U.S. Army, L3Harris and ANSYS Collaborate to Improve Aviation Performance and Affordability

The U.S. Army, L3Harris Technologies and ANSYS are advancing the performance and affordability of next-generation aviation and missile system applications. The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Aviation & Missile Center (AvMC) evaluated commercially available solutions to support rapid integration of software aligned to the FACE Technical Standard through a joint Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA).

The FACE Technical Standard enables software on embedded military computing systems to be more interoperable, portable and secure. The CRADA used L3Harris and ANSYS-developed software aligned to FACE Technical Standard hosted on the Crew Mission System (CMS) platform for the Cockpit Display Station (CDS). The CRADA represents progress in showcasing how model-based development tools like ANSYS SCADE, along with L3Harris’ FliteScene, can support rapid standards-based integration in support of the FACE Technical Standard and ARINC 661 standards.

"Adding new capabilities into our enduring platforms has been costly in both time and money. With emerging threats and limited resources, we simply have to provide more capabilities to our warfighters faster with less funding," says Joe Carter, U.S. Army Program Executive Office Aviation G10 tactical branch chief and FACE Consortium Steering Committee chair. 

"Contributions from our industry partners, including ANSYS and L3Harris, help exercise and mature the FACE Technical Standard allowing rapid integration of capabilities for our warfighters," Carter adds. "This enables us to provide our warfighters a wide variety of new and improved capabilities from any number of technology suppliers."

The ANSYS SCADE software toolset efficiently enables a complete workflow ranging from FACE modeling through DO-178C (up to DAL-A) certifiable code-level generation. ANSYS tools support software development aligned to the FACE Technical Standard at both the model and generated code levels, providing users with an easy workflow that passes the FACE Conformance Test Suite (CTS). This streamlines the development effort of embedded control/display/HMI applications aligned to the FACE Technical Standard and is compliant to the ARINC 661 standard.

"L3Harris is a leading supplier of current and emerging airborne software applications," says Matt Collins, general manager, Mission Avionics, L3Harris Space and Airborne Systems. "Through the CRADA, L3Harris will further speed innovations in background digital moving map technology for CDS."

ANSYS SCADE Solutions for ARINC 661 compliant systems fully adhere to the ARINC 661 standard, including the ARINC 661 Server, the User Applications (UA), standard binary and XML Definition Files (DF), and the communication code between Ansys SCADE UA models and any ARINC 661 Server. 

"The U.S. Army depends on the efficiency of safety-critical software development and integration efforts to advance emerging aviation and missile system capabilities while keeping program costs down," says Eric Bantegnie, vice president and general manager at ANSYS. "ANSYS looks forward to providing next-generation solutions that are aligned with the Army's model-based systems engineering initiatives and open system architecture standards."

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.