Technology Rapid Integration and Deployment (TRIAD)

Rapidly integrating new capabilities such as advanced sensors, communications, and edge decision software onto legacy aircraft is vital to ensuring warfighting advantages against peer adversaries. Unfortunately, adding these capabilities is a multi-year endeavor, exacerbated by behavioral interoperability shortfalls. Interface issues between avionics subsystems found during integration often result in extended, costly integration timelines. Warfighters and industry desire ôplug-and-playö for avionics subsystems but are falling short even with Modular Open Systems Approach-aligned standards, perpetuating the lengthy and costly integrations required to bring war-winning capabilities to bear. ZDEN Technologies LLC developed a patent-pending edge computing and deployment system called Technology Rapid Integration and Deployment (TRIAD) that consists of a software factory, a continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline using over-air updates, an open-standards hardened edge node, and novel reinforcement-learning methodologies for integration. The resulting bolt-on edge node can integrate new sensors and mission subsystems in weeks versus months or years and can continuously deploy containerized software payloads in flight, yielding an asymmetric advantage to our legacy platforms when fielded. The TRIAD SBIR will establish the system architecture, system requirements, and preliminary hardware and software designs. The SBIR will demonstrate certification process automation to include configuration management, software qualification, airworthiness, nuclear certification, and cybersecurity. The effort will create a preliminary Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) bill of materials (BOM) and manufacturing approach. These activities will culminate in a demonstration of continuous deployment of certified software to a prototype system, showing TRIADĺs viability to produce and deploy at scale, with maturity sufficient for a Milestone B decision gating potential Phase 3 EMD programs. á