The U.S. Department of Defense has stood up a working group to promote modular, open-systems architecture (MOSA) in acquisition programs, a DoD official said Oct. 18.
The membership of the modular open systems working group is currently limited to government agencies, including representatives of the Air Force, Army, Navy and parts of the Pentagon acquisition office, said Philomena “Phil” Zimmerman, deputy director of engineering tools and environments in the office of the deputy assistant secretary of defense for systems engineering. But the group eventually plans to include industry.
The group’s mission is to look at “what is available to be shared and where are there areas that need additional help,” Zimmerman explained at the ninth annual Open Architecture Summit hosted by Defense Daily in Washington, D.C. “It’s not our job to develop standards. It is our job to identify where we have gaps in practice.”
DoD officials say that open systems will allow the military to upgrade its technology more quickly to keep pace with rapidly changing threats.
The services are proceeding with their own efforts to promote open systems architecture. For instance, the Air Force’s Resilient Embedded GPS/INS (R-EGI) initiative aims to create an avionics device that blends Global Positioning System and Inertial Navigation System measurements and that can be continuously improved.
Industry representatives asserted that DoD still has a long ways to go to achieve open systems, and that the department needs to find ways to incentivize companies to overcome their intellectual property concerns and commit to open architecture. Todd Probert, vice president of mission support and modernization at Raytheon [RTN] Intelligence, Information and Services, said that many fighter jets still cannot share data with each other directly because they have different data links.
Fighters often get around that obstacle by relaying information through the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) on the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Global Hawk unmanned aircraft, but Probert considers that approach to be an inefficient way to talk to each other. “It’s a screaming cry for standards and better architectural approaches,” Probert said.
By contrast, the new Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), which Raytheon developed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), uses open-source software and can share weather forecast information across the agency, DoD, academia, industry and even other countries. “What it’s allowed NOAA to do is to get its data out to the maximum set of participants,” Probert said.