Affordable software design for an open systems hardware architecture

With shrinking defense budgets, creating affordable software without decreasing performance is quickly becoming a requirement for obtaining new government contracts. Minimizing life cycle cost (LCC) becomes a key goal in achieving affordability. In a modern world with technology advances occurring at an exponential rate, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to design an embedded system architecture that can withstand significant design impacts to accommodate changes in the hardware it controls. This is the challenge proposed by the Integrated Sensor System (ISS) program, which utilizes Open Systems Architecture (OSA) concepts for designing an integrated Radio Frequency (RF) avionics system. ISS envisions a shared resource concept for performing RF functions and has been designed to easily accept advances in technology to enhance RF performance throughout the life of the host aircraft. This paper outlines the ISS control software architecture developed by an inter-company team of software engineers led by Boeing. The paper identifies how the architecture minimizes LCC by reducing software impacts resulting from hardware changes and emphasizes how the design could be applied successfully for any resource-sharing system.