computer science

Future Airborne Capability Environment

Future Airborne Capability Environment is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Future Airborne Capability Environment rather than just read about it. In short: The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE Consortium) was formed in 2010 to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. Today, it is a real-time software-focused professional group made up of industry suppliers, customers, academia, and users.

Key takeaways

Future Airborne Capability Environment belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Future Airborne Capability Environment to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Future Airborne Capability Environment from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE Consortium) was formed in 2010 to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. Today, it is a real-time software-focused professional group made up of industry suppliers, customers, academia, and users. The FACE approach is a government-industry software standard and business strategy for acquisition of affordable software systems that promotes innovation and rapid integration of portable capabilities across programs. The FACE Consortium provides a vendor-neutral forum for industry and government to work together to develop and consolidate the open standards, best practices, guidance documents, and business strategy necessary to result in:

Standardized approaches for using open standards within avionics systems Lower implementation costs of FACE systems Standards that support a robust architecture and enable quality software development The use of standard interfaces that will lead to reuse of capabilities Portability of applications across multiple FACE systems and vendors Procurement of FACE conformant products More capabilities reaching the customer faster Innovation and competition within the avionics industry The FACE Technical Standard is an open real-time standard for making safety-critical computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable and secure. Although the consortium started with a focus on avionics, the applicability of the technical standard and its associated data model have become much broader. The standard enables software developers to create and deploy a wide catalog of applications for use across the entire spectrum of real-time systems through a common operating environment. The latest edition of the standard further promotes application interoperability and portability with enhanced requirements for exchanging data among FACE components, including a formally specified data model, and emphasis on defining common language requirements for the standard.

Membership Until 2022, individual members were required to be US persons. In 2022, the consortium moved to open membership to the countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Individuals can only become members if they are employed by a company that is a member. Corporate membership is at different levels. The sponsor-level members are Boeing, Collins Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, US Air Force LCMC, and US Army PEO Aviation, and US Naval Air Systems Command.

Background The FACE effort sprang from US Navy open architecture programs, promoted by the US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), to enhance interoperability and software portability for avionics software applications across DoD aviation platforms. Both the US Army and US Air Force have been participating in the consortium. NAVAIR led the pack with early acquisitions, followed later by Army and Air Force. The FACE Consortium was formed by The Open Group as a "Voluntary Consensus Standards Body", as defined by the National Technology Transfer Act and OMB Circular A-119. This facilitates government participation in the consortium. One goal of the effort is to reduce the typical development and deployment cycle of new capabilities in military airborne platforms from as long as six years under the current methodology to as little as six months. The FACE reference architecture ecosystem includes software product conformance verification and certification processes. In October 2016, a suite of flight management software earned the first FACE certificate of conformance. One may view information on all certified FACE conformant products at the FACE Registry

Technical approach The FACE technical approach tackles barriers to software modularity, portability, and interoperability by defining a Reference Architecture and employing design principles to enhance software portability. To meet the objectives of the technical approach, the FACE Technical Standard uses a standardized architecture describing a conceptual breakdown of functionality, called the FACE Reference Architecture, to promote the reuse of software components able to share common functionality across disparate systems. This architecture defines standardized interfaces to allow software components to be moved between systems, including those developed by different vendors. The standardized interfaces follow a data architecture to ensure the data communicated between the software components is fully described to facilitate their integration on new systems.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Future Airborne Capability Environment

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Future Airborne Capability Environment claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Future Airborne Capability Environment before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Future Airborne Capability Environment ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Future Airborne Capability Environment

In research: Future Airborne Capability Environment appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Future Airborne Capability Environment in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Future Airborne Capability Environment is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Computer standards, Open Group standards, Open standards, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Future Airborne Capability Environment outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Future Airborne Capability Environment in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Future Airborne Capability Environment means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Future Airborne Capability Environment out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Future Airborne Capability Environment in simple terms?

Why does Future Airborne Capability Environment matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Future Airborne Capability Environment?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Future Airborne Capability Environment.