BALTIMORE — The future airborne capability environment (FACE) consortium is working with the F-35 Lightning II program office in anticipation that future upgrades to the aircraft’s avionics software will be open to vendors other than Lockheed Martin [LMT].

Pentagon officials, including Air Force Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, chief of Air Force F-35 integration, have called for future block upgrades to the aircraft’s software to be bid out to other companies. That would require Lockheed Martin to at least make the software interfaces compatible with other vendors’ products.

F-35A conventional Air Force variant of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Photo: Air Force.
F-35A conventional Air Force variant of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Photo: Air Force.

Air Force acquisitions chief William LaPlante has said the service would push for open systems architectures in the Block 4 upgrades, the first capability enhancement planned after the service’s variant of the aircraft goes operational in 2016.

FACE is a consortium of voluntary industry members that have signed on to develop a set of technical standards for avionics and communications software. Included in requirements for future programs, the FACE standards are designed so that software will be decoupled from hardware. Lockheed Martin will not be shut out of F-35 block upgrades, even if they do carry requirements for FACE conformance. The company is a member of the consortium designing the standards and could develop technologies to them regardless of membership.

Historically, common interfaces have been required in hardware, while software is typically tied to hardware and, therefore, proprietary and stovepiped, Doug Schmidt, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the Software Engineering Institute, said at Defense Daily’s 2014 open Architecture Summit.

The F-35 is both the most expensive and most technologically complex weapon every developed. Its 8 million lines of software code — four times as many as the F-22 Raptor — are in the process of being completed and verified by Lockheed Martin. The complexity of writing and re-checking the code is one reason that the program is infamously over budget and behind schedule. Lockheed Martin owns the intellectual property to the software and is, therefore, the only company that can do the work.

There is no mandate for any Pentagon program office to include FACE standards in their requirements documents, said Terry Carlson, assistant program officer for FACE information management at Army program executive office aviation and current chair of the FACE steering committee.

“F-35 program management can dip into the library and find FACE certified conformant software products and use them if they so choose,” Carlson said. “Each program has the choice whether to do it or not. We certain go out and educate and encourage … but there is no mandate.”

David Boyette, project manager for modular integrated survivability aviation science and technology at the Army Aviation & Missile Research Development and Engineering Center and a representative to FACE, said the consortium has been aggressive in its outreach efforts, preaching to message and benefits of open architecture standards in avionics to program managers throughout the Defense Department.

“I’m optimistic,” Boyette said. “We actually do have some people in F-35 now who are, let’s just say, very knowledgeable about FACE. Hopefully we’ll be able to get some toeholds into that program as they go through their refresh cycles.”

Boyette and Carlson both spoke Monday at a forum here hosted by the Open Group, which advocates for common standards and open architecture in software and information technology. FACE is a subsidiary consortium of the Open Group.

For that to happen, FACE first has to establish a third-party certification authority, which should be done in a couple months, Boyette said. Currently avionics software vendors can build to the FACE standards and measure their conformance with tools provided online by FACE. They will only be able to advertise products as FACE conformal once each technology is independently certified as such by the authority.

Each new product that adheres to the interface standards will be cataloged in a “library” into which program managers can delve for technologies that suit individual hardware platforms.

Boyette gave the example of a common household light bulb. From Thomas Edison’s initial design to modern LED bulbs, the socket into which bulbs screw has not changed. What changes is the application powered by the interface of the bulb and the socket.

“We are defining and locking down what those interfaces are for software capabilities…and allowing vendors, software suppliers to innovate and bring the real flavor of their software design into that top level of the architecture while still allowing interoperability across systems,” Boyette said.

Open architectures and common development standards like those FACE is promoting, would allow competition and innovation to lower the cost of developing advanced weapons like the F-35, Boyette said.

The broader idea is to bring down the cost of developing and upgrading current and future aircraft platforms because the cost curve from jets like the F-15 to the F-22 and F-35 is growing exponentially and is not sustainable, Boyette said.

“As we shift from a hardware-centric world to a software-centric world, we’re really starting to see those costs grow exponentially higher,” Boyette said. “We need to figure out ways to bring that cost curve down and make these platforms actually affordable.”

Manufacturers of commercial aircraft experienced the same exponential development cost as aircraft became more technologically advanced. In response to the trend, companies like Boeing [BA] and Airbus began establishing software development standards to allow reuse across their fleets, Boyette said.

“The [Boeing] 787 is really the first true example of that standards-based software reuse across platforms,” he said. “They were able to drastically reduce the cost of bring that system to the customer. What we want to do is do the same thing on the military side.”

The 2015 Defense Daily Open Architecture Summit will be held Nov. 4 at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. More information about the panel topics and speaker list can be found here: www.openarchitecturesummit.com.