Study of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) and proposal of an avionics SW architecture implementing Open Architecture (OA), Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) concepts

Today's military aviation systems are usually developed by a single vendor for specific requirements. While effective, this approach has drawbacks such as long lead times, complex improvement processes, and limited hardware and software reuse across different aircraft, leading to unique designs for each platform. The complexity of modern mission equipment and electronics has increased costs and integration times, impacting the deployment of new capabilities across the military aviation fleet. Extensive testing and airworthy qualification requirements further exacerbate this issue. The current procurement system does not encourage hardware and software reuse across programs, and the aviation community lacks sufficient standards for software component reuse. Contributing factors include the small military aviation market, challenges in developing qualified aviation software, and the inability to use commercial software standards due to stringent safety requirements aimed at minimizing risks, mission capability loss, and potential loss of life. Given all these issues, the military aviation market is evolving towards new paradigms which foster modularity, portability and reusability of its own components. The new picture, show the emergence of new reference architectures with the precise goal of fulfilling the previous requirements, following the concept Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA). In this scenario, the new Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical standard stands out proposing a solution following strictly the IMA and MOSA approach. The purpose of this thesis project is to deal with this new standard by means of proposing a valid solution for the problems described before; thus the ultimate goal is proposing an avionic software architecture, conformant with the FACE Technical Standard, in order to foster reusability, interoperability and portability on avionic software. In the first part of this thesis work, a brief presentation about IMA and MOSA topics is given explaining the advantages brought in by these new paradigms and the challenges to face in order to achieve a widespread use of new architectural solutions. After that, FACE fundamental concepts and Share Data Model explanation are provided to introduce the reader to the technicalities of the field and to give her the tools to deal with all the terms and aspects presented in the current document. In the second part of the thesis, a case study will be discussed in details in order to show a possible fully working scenario of deployment. A premise is need in this context: the code developed in for this current thesis is a vertical slice of the FACE Standard stack since all the layers are discussed, analyzed and implemented; only few features from each layer are implemented since the Standard provide a very wide set of guidelines which involve disparate aspects, some of which could not be treated in this current work for brevity reasons. The code will realized a FACE Standard data pipeline which starts from the acquisition of aircraft simulated data to the graphical symbology calculation in order to display plane data by means of a window. This pipelines goes through all the FACE layers, especially the PSSS and PCS in which multiple applications reside and communicate to each other by means of the IOSS or the TSS.