By Geoff Fein
The Navy earlier this month issued its sixth quarterly report to Congress on the state of the service’s open architecture (OA) efforts, highlighting several key documents and efforts achieved in the first three months of 2009.
Chief among many of the OA efforts being pursued are new technologies and advancements being incorporated into the Navy’s Unmanned Combat Aerial System (UCAS) program.
Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) updated and released a second draft of its Architecture Description Document (ADD) to the Software, Hardware Asset Re-use Enterprise (SHARE) library for qualified government and industry review and comment.
The update to the draft ADD follows the release last fall of the Surface Navy Combat Systems Development Strategy and Acquisition Management Plan (AMP) and the initial draft ADD.
The AMP provides an executive-level plan for implementing the surface domain’s open architecture acquisition strategy. The ADD begins the process of defining future surface combat systems architecture to a level sufficient to guide the transformation of legacy surface domain combat systems into a single product line, according to the 21-page progress report.
There have been 33 total requests (13 from industry and 20 from government) for the AMP, according to the report.
In March, the Navy awarded Global Technical Systems (GTS) a $95 million contract for the Common Processing System (CPS). According to the report, CPS “will provide the hardware that will serve as the foundation for implementation of OA in the Navy’s surface combat systems.”
However, work has yet to begin on CPS, as Argon ST, Inc. has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) over the contract award. Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) lifted a stop work order on May 1, following an unsuccessful agency protest filed by Argon. On May 11, Argon took its protest to GAO. A decision is expected by late August.
The air domain is making progress on implementing OA in a number of areas, including the E-2C/E-2D and the P-3C/P-8A aircraft programs and the Navy UCAS, along with various procurement efforts such as Air Domain Electro-optical/Infrared Sensor Program, the report noted.
The Navy’s UCAS program office is demonstrating a persistent, penetrating unmanned low-observable platform that can operate from United States aircraft carriers and perform refueling. “As part of this demonstration, the UCAS program office is exploring how to implement OA in a clean-sheet aviation system design in order to maximize cost-effectiveness and minimize fielding time,” according to the report.
Key objectives of the Navy UCAS OA approach include:
- Designing for scalability. The Navy UCAS program personnel are working the underlying business model to achieve true scalability (and cost savings) through software, communications (networks) and hardware.
- Fully networked. The Navy UCAS is being conceptualized from the ground up as a fully networked platform with the goal of eliminating all stove piped, legacy communications approaches.
- Integrated applications. In the fully networked concept, all functions operate as services operating on redundant networks. UCAS has integrated six functions currently performed by legacy systems–navigation, approach and landing, radio communications, situational awareness, air traffic control, and command and control, as a software services over a redundant network.
- Cost effective. When the Navy UCAS program first converted their developmental software from legacy communications systems to a fully Internet protocol-networked approach in 2005, they achieved an 80 percent reduction in software costs.
- Safety of flight. The Navy UCAS has demonstrated through surrogate testing that robust, repeatable, low latency performance can be achieved with radio frequency networks, allowing OA, IP-based services to be used even for safety of flight applications.
PEO Command, Control, Communications, Coordination and Information (C4I) has established a design budget initiative to deliver C4I equipment suites as late as possible during ship construction to avoid costly upgrades shortly after ship commissioning, the report said.
“This is part of a continuous process improvement effort which will be replicated to multiple platforms, according to the report.
PEO C4I is scheduled to release the request for proposals for the Navy Global Positioning Network Timing Service in summer 2009, the report said. It uses the OA Contract Guidebook to support service-oriented architecture requirements for interoperability and reuse of services that collect geospatial information for a variety of consumers.
The submarine domain is managing competitions for combat system subsystems that include OA and new automated testing requirements as part of its continued efforts to deliver new capability with reduced cycle time and cost, the report said.
The space domain has taken Mobile User Objective System waveform artifacts and deposited them in the Joint Tactical Radio System Information Repository and 10 developers have received copies, the report noted.
PEO Space Systems is also pursuing OA tenets per their science and technology concept of operation through active participation in the small business innovative research (SBIR) process.
The Marine Corps remains focused on a cooperative review of program OA policy and implementation status within Marine Corps Systems Command and PEO Land Systems. Representatives from the two organizations are taking part in the OA executive team’s support of systems engineering technical review updates.