Military Aerospace & Electronics Show

Yesterday, I attended the UK's Military Aerospace & Electronics technical conference and exhibition, which was held at the Heritage Motor Centre. The technical conference was split into three technical tracks, which were broadly related to avionics, land systems and technologies; and as is sometimes the case at these conferences I found that I wanted to attend some presentations which were running concurrently!

At a high-level, there were recurring themes amongst the presentations relating to modularisation, reconfigurability and of course, security. Some of the presentations discussed these issues in the context of the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) programme, which is broadly speaking the UK equivalent of the US Future Combat System (FCS) programme. It was interesting to hear how future upgradeability through planned obsolescence and technology insertion prior to deployment, and the recognition that standards-based open architectures could facilitate this requirement.

Michael Morua of Atkins Defence Systems (MOD-appointed Systems House for FRES) gave a technical presentation on how the FRES Electronic Architecture (EA) is being implemented using a service oriented architecture, and even explained how reconfigurability would be achieved through open interface standards, and interfaces to external systems could be implemented through common data exchange middleware.

I always appreciate the opportunity to learn about emerging technologies at these conferences, so I was glad that I attended Peter Allsopp of GE Aviation's (formerly Smiths Aerospace) technical presentation 'Networked Aerospace Systems - Future Data Network Technologies'. It was interesting to hear how as data throughput requirements for avionics networks increase, the determinism, latency and availability requirements become harder to maintain with current avionics networking technologies. It appears that FlexRay, an open standard for time-triggered field bus technology may provide the way forward.

FlexRay was originally developed for safety-critical automotive applications, so it's encouraging to see that avionics can potentially benefit from the more widespread deployment of technologies in the automotive sector. This suggests that there can be cross-fertilisation between aerospace and automotive in both directions (blog: Can Automotive learn from Avionics Safety?).

Comments

[System Engineer]

Relevant information in this regards on databusses was published by VSI:
The Vehicle Systems Integration programme is an Applied Research programme funded by the UK MoD.

A major output of the VSI programme is the publication & maintenance of the Vetronics Standards & Guidelines. The latest version of this document was released in October 2007.
This Standard & Guideline specifically compares databusses for vetronics applications.

see the full VSI Standard & Guideline at:
http://www.vsi.org.uk/SG_2007_Issue1.pdf

[Paul Parkinson]

Thanks, I'll look forward to reading the guidelines.

[Gordon McCabe]

FRES was originally supposed to be in-service by 2009, but the main contractor is now suggesting that 2017 is a more realistic date.

I think a large degree of the responsibility for this lies with the MoD’s general approach to procurement, and its naive belief in the value of Systems Engineering methodology. The MoD routinely farms work out to Systems Houses when it doesn’t want to make a decision itself; it’s a form of institutionalised procrastination.