A NEW ‘FACE’ FOR AVIATION ACQUISITION


TIME FOR AN UPGRADE?


Soldiers assigned to 16th Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB), 7th Infantry Division conduct maintenance in July on a CH-47 Chinook helicopter at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan. The CH-47 is an example of an aircraft that could benefit from using the FACE architecture when incorporating upgrades. (U.S. Army photo by Capt. Brian Harris, 16th CAB)


The reuse of software across multiple platforms reduces development costs, integration costs and time to field.


BITS event was a valuable integration experience. “Te BITS event served as an opportunity for software suppliers to get


their


feet wet using the FACE


approach for designing software,” said Chris Crook, systems software ana- lyst with Intrepid Inc., a small business provider of services and technologies in the federal marketplace. “Te occa- sion gave vendors the chance to see a working example of a FACE refer- ence architecture, BALSA; dive into it to see and understand how the pieces work together; then learn how to use those pieces in unison with their own software and share what they learned.” Immediately after the BITS event, three software companies spent four hours working together to integrate six com- ponents and four external devices with BALSA.


36


Four teams representing 10 FACE Consor- tium member organizations participated in the June 2017 FACE Consortium BITS event. One team, composed of three recent college graduates, integrated a com- mercial off-the-shelf GPS with BALSA on a Raspberry Pi. Te Raspberry Pi, developed by the U.K.-based Raspberry Pi Foundation, is a small, low-cost, pro- grammable, powerful computer found around the world. It uses an open-source operating system and was designed to encourage users to learn programming by tinkering. Feedback from a second team underscored the ease of replacing one of the components in BALSA with that same component from their software. “With the FACE approach as a common, well- understood framework, it is easy to dive into BALSA and replace its transport ser- vices segment with our implementation


Army AL&T Magazine


October-December 2017


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