The Open Group FACE Consortium published the first set of documents defining the FACE Approach in 2010. The primary goal of the FACE approach is to enhance portability of software components from one operating environment to another, resulting in cost savings and improved warfighting capabilities.
The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Approach is a joint effort from Government and industry organizations. The approach includes a software development standard and business strategy with the aim of:
The FACE Approach integrates technical and business practices that establish a standard common operating environment to support portable capabilities across avionics systems.
A Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) is an integrated business and technical strategy to achieve competitive and affordable acquisition and sustainment over the system life cycle. MOSA is an acquisition and design strategy, consisting of technical architectures, that adopts open standards and supports a modular, loosely coupled, and highly cohesive system structure.
Under recent US legislation – Title 10 U.S.C. 2446a.(b), Sec 805 – all major defense acquisition programs (MDAP) are to be designed and developed using a MOSA. For defense systems software, conformance with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard satisfies this requirement.
The FACE Consortium is a US government and industry partnership working to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. The current list of consortium members can be found on the Open Group FACE website.
The FACE Reference Architecture is specified in the FACE Technical Standard. The architecture is comprised of five layered segments where a FACE Unit of Conformance (UoC) may reside:
The FACE standard has gone through several iterations. Versions 1.x and 2.x of the standard focused primarily on ensuring the right subset of APIs were provided to the correct profiles. There are several powerful motivators for OEMs to migrate to version 3.1, such as the inclusion of:
This white paper discusses the challenges of FACE 3.1 adoption. It was written by LDRA Certification Services (LCS) in their role as a FACE Verification Authority, a defence systems OEM, and a tier one RTOS provider. There is an on-demand webinar on the same topic available here.
As specified in the FACE Technical Standard, a UoC is:
“A software component or domain-specific data model designed to meet the applicable requirements defined in the FACE Technical Standard. It is referenced as a UoC at any point in its development, and becomes a FACE Certified UoC upon completion of the FACE Conformance Process.”
A UoP is any UoC that resides in the Portable Components Segment or the Platform-Specific Services Segment of the FACE Reference Architecture.
FACE Conformance is a program defined by the FACE Consortium for verifying a UoC conforms to FACE Technical Standard requirements for creating portable and reusable software. There are three steps in the conformance process: technical verification by an approved Verification Authority (VA), certification by the FACE Certification Authority (CA), and registration into the FACE Library.
According to the FACE Conformance Guide, a FACE Verification Authority (VA) is one of several organizations approved by the FACE Consortium to evaluate software against the FACE Technical Standard. The VA is required to review all supporting documentation for all requirements in the FACE Technical Standard for which the UoC is seeking certification. The For-the-Record test of the UoC is conducted or witnessed by an approved VA with an approved FACE Conformance Test Suite (CTS). In order to promote a common approach to Verification, all approved Verification Authorities are members of the FACE Verification Authority Community of Practice (VA CoP).
The FACE Technical Standard and DO-178C, Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification, are both pivotal software standards in the avionics world. The FACE Technical Standard’s primary objectives are software portability and reusability. In addition to defining the FACE Reference Architecture, the FACE Technical Standard details what needs to be implemented in each segment. In contrast, DO-178C does not propose a design, design rules, or design constraints. Instead, DO-178C is more focused on the level of safety that must be achieved, and capturing the necessary evidence to have confidence a design is safe. To minimize the cost and effort of complying with both standards concurrently, it is important to take both standards into consideration during validation and verification.
The LDRA product and services portfolio includes several solutions to simplify the work of developing FACE Conformant UoCs, as well as to achieve FACE Conformance.
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