Future Airborne Capability Environment

Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Consortium

The Open Group FACE Consortium was formed in 2010 to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. Today, it is an aviation-focused professional group made up of industry suppliers, customers, academia, and users. The FACE approach is a government-industry software standard and business strategy for acquisition of affordable software systems that promotes innovation and rapid integration of portable capabilities across global defense programs. The FACE Consortium provides a vendor-neutral forum for industry and government to work together to develop and consolidate the open standards, best practices, guidance documents, and business strategy necessary to result in:[1]

• Standardized approaches for using open standards within avionics systems
• Lower implementation costs of FACE systems
• Standards that support a robust architecture and enable quality software development
• The use of standard interfaces that will lead to reuse of capabilities
• Portability of applications across multiple FACE systems and vendors
• Procurement of FACE conformant products
• More capabilities reaching the warfighter faster
• Innovation and competition within the avionics industry

The FACE Technical Standard is the open avionics standard for making military computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable and secure. The standard enables developers to create and deploy a wide catalog of applications for use across the entire spectrum of military aviation systems through a common operating environment. The latest edition of the standard further promotes application interoperability and portability with enhanced requirements for exchanging data among FACE components and emphasis on defining common language requirements for the standard.

All FACE Consortium business and technical materials published by The Open Group are available to download free of charge. [2]

Background

The FACE effort sprang from US Navy open architecture programs,[3] promoted by the US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), to enhance interoperability and software portability for avionics software applications across DoD aviation platforms. NAVAIR is leading the pack with FACE acquisitions. [4]

The FACE Consortium was formed by The Open Group as a "Voluntary Consensus Standards Body", as defined by the National Technology Transfer Act and OMB Circular A-119. This facilitates government participation in the consortium. [5] One goal of the effort is to reduce the typical development and deployment cycle of new capabilities in military airborne platforms from as long as six years under the current methodology to as little as six months. [6]

The FACE reference architecture ecosystem includes software product conformance verification and certification processes. [7] In October 2016, a suite of flight management software earned the first FACE certificate of compliance. [8]

References

  1. ↑ FACE Consortium Information, uploaded with permission
  2. ↑ FACE Documents and Tools
  3. ↑ FACE initiative takes aim at improved interoperability and standards among future military avionics platforms
  4. ↑ AV-8B, C-130T Will Be First To Meet Navy’s FACE Avionics Software Standards
  5. ↑ FACE™ Consortium : Frequently Asked Questions
  6. ↑ U.S. Navy, Army Seek Open-Airborne Computing
  7. ↑ "FACE Conformance | The Open Group". www.opengroup.org. Retrieved 2016-11-22.
  8. ↑ TeamAirsoc. "ROCKWELL COLLINS RECEIVES THE FIRST FACE™ CONFORMANCE CERTIFICATE FOR RNP RNAV CAPABLE FMS - airsoc.com". Airsoc.com. Retrieved 2016-11-22.


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