Software Architecture for Universal Plug and Play of Weapons

The Air Force has begun an initiative termed Universal Armament Interface (UAI) to address decoupling of store integration from the aircraft software upgrade cycle. While UAI offers promise for a reasonable level of plug and play capability at the aircraft/store interface, it is based on the premise that each aircraft will provide the standard UAI messaging services through its platform-specific software architecture and processing environment. This approach will not, however, provide a common application programming interface (API) for such upgrades, meaning that unique software must still be separately developed for each platform to provide the same application level functionality. For UAI to have the maximum payoff, it must be retrofittable to as many existing platforms as possible with minimum required avionics upgrades and delivered via a common API. Assuming some minimal level of processing throughput, it is believed that UAI with a common API can be implemented on many of these platforms through an adaptation layer of software, which we refer to here as the Platform Adaptation Layer (PAL). This proposal is to provide a Platform Adaptation Layer for integration into existing platform processing environments, along with features to ensure adequate real-time performance and safety features in weapon employment applications, effectively allowing all future weapons upgrade software to reside in a common API.