U.S. Air Force – FACE™ and SOSA™ Technical Interchange Meeting and Expo

The U.S. Air Force – FACE™ and SOSA™ Technical Interchange Meeting and Expo, hosted by the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center (AFLCMC) is an important opportunity to discover new advancements and the progress being made for functionality and interoperability of modular open system environments. The event features DoD leaders and members in the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and the Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) Consortia. The TIM is open to the public and free to attend thanks to our Sponsors: Elma Electronic and Lockheed Martin.

FACE™ Consortium

The FACE™ Consortium is a government, academia, and industry partnership formed to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. It has since grown into an aviation-focused professional group made up of industry suppliers, customers, and users. It provides a vendor-neutral forum for industry, academia and government to work together to develop and consolidate the open standards, best practices, guidance documents, and business strategy. These objectives promote acquisition of affordable software systems, innovation, rapid integration of portable capabilities across global defense programs, and higher efficiency to deploy capabilities.

SOSA™ Consortium

The Open Group SOSA™ Consortium enables government and industry to collaboratively develop open standards and best practices to enable, enhance, and accelerate the deployment of affordable, capable, interoperable sensor systems. SOSA is creating open system reference architectures applicable to military and commercial sensor systems and a business model that balances stakeholder interests. The architectures employ modular design and use widely supported, consensus-based, nonproprietary standards for key interfaces. The SOSA Consortium creates a common framework for transitioning sensor systems to an open systems architecture, based on key interfaces and open standards established by industry-government consensus. The SOSA approach establishes guidelines for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. The architecture will incorporate both hardware and software components to handle demanding processing and data requirements, ease system upgrades, reduce total cost of ownership, and promote competitive acquisition with minimal system reworks.

In line with the MOSA directive from the Department of Defense, the SOSA Technical Standard leverages modular design and widely supported, consensus-based, non-proprietary standards for key interfaces that are expected to:

• Reduce Aircraft Integration and Airworthiness Costs and Schedule
• Decrease time to reconfigure Pods for new missions (months => hours or less!)
• Reduce complexity by creating reusable building blocks
• Increase interoperability and interchangeability of Electrical, Mechanical and Software components
• Reduce project costs by creating commodity components
• Simplify acquisition
• Increase assurance that components perform as expected
• Support the development and integration efforts by providing:
  • Technical Standard of Architecture
  • Reference Implementation Guide (RIG)
  • Open Business Model (Contracting Guide)
  • Conformance Certification Program

The Open Group

The Open Group is a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objectives through technology standards.  Our diverse membership includes customers, systems and solutions suppliers, tool vendors, integrators, academics, and consultants across multiple industries. It is also an enabler for consortium participation by US Government agencies. For further information, visit www.opengroup.org.

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