By Jacob Meyer, Communications Intern
Elbit America will perform demonstrations at the upcoming U.S. Army FACE and SOSA Technical Interchange Meeting on September 14 at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The event will bring together personnel from the Department of Defense, the Defense industry and academia for presentations and demonstrations. Discussions will focus on the research, development and benefits of adopting FACE and SOSA.
FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment) and SOSA (Sensor Open Systems Architecture) are implementations of the Modular Open Systems Approach for avionics software and hardware used by companies who support the DoD.
FACE creates design standards for software that allow programs to be more readily updated, while providing significant cost savings to the Armed Services.
“FACE is a software standard that mitigates the ‘1 line of software change costing one million dollars’ issue,” said Keith Grandin, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Elbit America.
SOSA developed from FACE as it became apparent that standards for hardware would be necessary alongside software. The hardware standards also allow customers who utilize FACE and SOSA products, like the U.S. Army, to avoid vendor lock-in, where they become dependent on a single company’s products and are unable to switch without incurring significant costs.
“FACE software abstraction is just part of the solution and does not address hardware,” Grandin said. “The SOSA standard addresses hardware interoperability and standardizes some software-hardware dependencies.”
Elbit America is committed to the development of FACE. After demonstrating how FACE helps vendors integrate software back in 2019, the company will showcase its own FACE infrastructure at the upcoming Technical Exchange Meeting. The FACE architecture being demonstrated by Elbit America gathers data from platform displays, sensors and systems to be processed and utilized by a range of vendor applications.
The program that will be used in the demonstration is an Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast (ADS-B) reader application, a system used by air traffic controllers to monitor the movement of aircraft. The system will read raw ADS-B data, process it and display information to users.
The FACE infrastructure will be running on SOSA-aligned hardware – a Concurrent Technologies 3U Xeon board and Abaco 3U Xeon board.
The Technical Interchange Meeting is hosted by the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Aviation in partnership with The Open Group, a global consortium that seeks to develop open technology standards. Elbit America is a Principle Member of The Open Group’s Future Airborne Capability Environment Consortium.
To learn more about the event, click here.
