Innovative Approaches to Agile Software Development for Secure Modular Avionics Architectures

During Avilution’s Phase II effort, Avilution has successfully aligned its eXtensible Flight System (XFS™) as a Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)™ 3.0 Transport Service (TS). This progress sets the stage for refining XFS during the proposed Sequential Phase II effort as a open system software architecture for potential use in the Army's Open Architecture Integration Test Bed (ITB). The Open Architecture ITB will serve as the network ecosystem for enabling the Army’s vision for its newly commissioned Combat Aviation Brigade Architecture Integration Lab (CABAIL). CABAIL's mission is to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate candidate technologies for upgrading current and future capabilities of Army Aviation. The ultimate goal for CABAIL is to accurately simulate the complete Combat Aviation Brigade environment so that Army Aviation Warfighters can perfect and demonstrate integrated solutions in the CABAIL’s controlled environment.   XFS’s FACE-aligned, hardware-agnostic, open software architecture makes it an ideal candidate for additional maturation as an enabling software framework for the Open Architecture ITB. XFS seamlessly connects and integrates sensors, computers, displays, and effectors from various manufacturers using disparate data protocols into a coherent, integrated system of Army CAB capabilities. Such an XFS-enabled Open Architecture ITB environment will create robustly integrated avionics and mission systems that are less encumbered by the high costs and high obsolescence rates that can plague today’s systems. Furthermore, XFS’s modular approach was designed from the start to facilitate fast component and sub-system swap-outs without requiring extensive system re-integration and retesting. This supports the Open Architecture ITB's critical role as a flexible integration tool for quickly assessing candidate CAB enhancements that are responsive to rapidly evolving threats. In addition, Avilution’s software licensing of the XFS source code (accompanied by all available test artifacts) reserves for PEO-Army Aviation complete contracting flexibility in CABAIL operations and long-term management. Avilution’s work scope for this proposed Sequential Phase II further refines and demonstrates the key XFS capabilities necessary to support the Open Architecture ITB. The proposed work tasks spring from four overarching objectives:  Demonstrate the technical feasibility of integrating avionics/mission system components from multiple Army programs into the CABAIL Open Architecture Integration Test Bed Demonstrate how utilizing a common bus architecture allows dissimilar avionics components to be rapidly integrated for evaluation in the Open Architecture ITB environment Provide the Army with an independent assessment of the strengths and limitations of the FACE™ 3.0 Technical Standard Develop Technical recommendations to address any shortcomings of the FACE™ 3.0 Technical Standard as they may apply to the goals of the Open Architecture ITB