By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s effort to develop a carrier capable combat drone is providing the service an opportunity to explore the art of the possible, literally building the Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) with an eye toward open architecture (OA).
“One of the unique opportunities that we have is that we have a clean sheet aircraft, so we look at things like OA,” Glenn Colby, aviation ship integration integrated product team lead, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“One of the hardest things to do is take a current system and give it OA interfaces when it wasn’t designed that way in the first place,” he added.
But if developers can start the effort from scratch, they can take a step back and look at how things could be done, Colby said.
In particular, the Navy has been looking at scalable systems for UCAS as a way to cut costs, rapidly introduce new capabilities and pace new threats, he said.
There has been a lot of examining why Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems have grown in cost. Some of the discussion has centered on whether systems are just too complex, have too many features, or if there are too many requirements, Colby said.
“What we are looking at is the fact that we think the missing element is scalability, and we call it ‘design for scalability,'” Colby said. “It’s really something that has come out of the commercial world and we are trying to look at what the commercial world does and how they architect complex systems and how that might apply to what we are doing.”
One example Colby noted is that when someone purchases a commercial off the shelf system (COTS), and it comes time to replace that component, the part is obsolete.
“The difference there is if you design for scalability…then you pull the old one out, put the new one in, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s the same exact model or not because the design for scalability ensures that you can plug the new one in and you get better capability at less cost,” he explained.
“If you don’t design for scalability and you are asking this vendor to give you the exact same model, it’s very costly, because in the commercial world nobody builds [that part] anymore. It’s very important to understand what scalability is because inherent scalability allows you to design in flexibility. In fact, scalability is one of the things that allows you to rapidly update your system,” Colby said.
The ability to rapidly update systems is more important than ever as the services face new threats and develop new missions, he added.
Building systems that are inherently scalable will result in being able to add capability, without redesigning the system, at a fraction of the cost than can be done today, Colby said.
One area where scalability will prove its worth is in communications, Colby noted.
While he points out that the underlying technology in communications is very important, today it’s not just about communications, but it’s also the software and the hardware.
“In the parlance of industry you would call these monolithic systems–meaning that if you change a piece of the system, you affect the whole system. And every time you make a change you have to go all the way through from one end to another. So you are writing the same codes for the same functions over and over and over again,” he said.
“In a scalable system, you would deploy a service and that service would communicate to all the different platforms you have out there and all the platforms would follow a common operating environment standard so that they all could interoperate with whatever you wrote,” Colby added.
Imagine having a new warfighting application with the ability to process radar data in a new way, he said.
“Instead of waiting for all the OFP [operational flight program] cycles to update and all the different platforms writing new software, you would just write a software service and deploy it out over the network to P-3s, and E-2s and F-18s, and UCAS,” Colby said. “It’s a much more powerful concept and you can see how it would not only save you money but you could do it much more rapidly assuming you had that scalable infrastructure in place.”
One of the bigger challenges and one the UCAS team has made a lot of progress on is the idea of using these scalable architectures in real time applications, he said.
“One of the first challenges for DoD that we have made a lot of progress on is showing we can use these scalable architectures for these real time…even safety critical type applications where we are actually using the network to support landing aircraft, command and control, air traffic control…” Colby said. “We’ve had a lot of progress on that. We started doing testing in that area in 2005, so we’ve actually incorporated that architecture into what we are doing.”
Another area that’s challenging is security, Colby added. “The kinds of security DoD requires makes some of the scalability technology challenging because it restricts how you exchange information on your system.
“Again, there has been a lot of different folks working in that area, but it’s one of the things that’s perhaps unique for DoD because of our security constraints,” he said.
While UCAS is in the development stage, Colby noted that if the day comes that the Navy asks for the system to be capable of carrying a variety of payloads, having a scalable system will make it feasible.
“Everything I am talking about in terms of having scalability built into the system, having scalable ways of moving that information across the Navy and DoD networks…that stuff all becomes very, very important,” he said.