Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)

Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)
Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)

Engineered for Seamless Integration

 
What is Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)?

The FACE Consortium, led by The Open Group, is aviation-focused and made up of U.S. industry suppliers, customers, and users. FACE aims to standardize approaches to bring open standards software to avionics systems. These avionics systems will result in lower implementation costs for the U.S. government and other adopters of the standard. Using the Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), Open Architecture (OA), and Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA), FACE supports a robust architecture for enabling software development.

 

FACE Demo: Curtiss-Wright, Wind River & CoreAVI

Wind River, Ansys, CoreAVI, Curtiss-Wright, and RTI have collaborated to create a solution stack that enables a digital cockpit flight display with touchscreen capabilities for a FACE solution.

Read More About FACE in our MOSA White Paper

Introducing your essential guide to all things MOSA. Read the white paper to explore

  • The MOSA directive and its significance for defense technology
  • Reasons to adopt a MOSA-based architecture
  • MOSA-supporting standards found in today's program requirements, including SOSA, CMOSS, VICTORY, GVA, FACE, and OMS/UCI.

 

 

Bringing Software Interoperability to Avionics Systems

The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Consortium is an aviation-focused professional group made up of U.S. industry suppliers, customers, and users. FACE aims to standardize approaches to bring open standards solutions to avionics systems. These avionics systems will result in lower implementation costs for the U.S. government and other adopters of the standard. Using the Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), Open Architecture (OA), and Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA), FACE supports a robust architecture for enabling software development.

By using standard interfaces, this open standard enables interoperability between systems and components, as well as interface reuse. The Future Airborne Capability Environment enables porting of application from multiple systems and vendors so that the warfighter can get the capabilities faster and at a reduced life cycle, up-front procurement, system integration, and upgrade/technology refresh cost and risk.

The FACE Consortium defines

  • requirements for Software Development Toolkit (SDK) extensions and test suites,
  • a Reference Implementation Guide,
  • a verification process, and
  • a repository for modular software applications/services.

Curtiss-Wright offers a broad range of modules and systems designed in compliance with FACE profile specifications, which have been demonstrated as hosts of FACE-conformant software applications and operating systems to develop.

Explore the Open Architecture Standards

Modular Open Systems Approach  
MOSA

An acquisition and design strategy that prioritizes the use of open standards-based technology.

C5ISR/EW Modular Open Suite of Standards  
CMOSS

Enables hardware and software commonality between platforms and command posts.

Sensor Open Systems Architecture  
SOSA

Defines common hardware and software for sensor processing systems.

Vehicle Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability  
VICTORY

Promotes the use of open standard physical and logical interfaces between LRU systems.

Modular Open Radio Frequency Architecture  
MORA

Developed to offer new capabilities including reducing SWaP as well as interoperability functions.

Generic Vehicle Architecture  
GVA

Mandates the use of open, modular, and scalable architectures in the design of new and upgraded ground vehicles.

Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing  
A-PNT

Ensures accurate positioning, navigation, and timing information is delivered in GPS/GNSS-denied environments.