Development suite sets US Army standard

The US Army's Future Combat System (FCS) programme is to standardise on Wind River Workbench as the foundation of the FCS software development environment.

The US Army's Future Combat System (FCS) programme is to standardise on Wind River Workbench as the foundation of the FCS software development environment for its software development activities.

Faced with the challenge of managing one of the most complex software development projects in history, Boeing, as lead systems integrator (LSI) for FCS, chose to standardise on a single development environment for FCS software development.

Boeing selected Wind River Workbench, based on its ability to operate across multiple development sites, hosts, operating systems and companies developing for the FCS programme.

Wind River's involvement in the FCS programme stands to increase overall productivity while significantly reducing risk, complexity and programme costs compared with traditional development environments.

The FCS forms the basis for the visionary transformation plan from the US Army, and is aimed at increasing the Army's agility, improving its capability to go anywhere and overcome any adversary.

The FCS programme, considered the core building block of the Army's future force, consists of the following elements: the network (information and communications); 18 individual combat systems including manned and unmanned systems; and the soldier Because all the constituent parts of the FCS programme are viewed as systems in themselves - including the 18 platforms, the network itself, and even the individual soldier - it is commonly referred to as a "system of systems".

The network is being designed by more than 2000 developers in various development sites across the USA to enhance co-ordination among all US forces, as well as between US and coalition forces.

FCS will allow soldiers to link to sensors, to unmanned air platforms, and to manned and unmanned ground platforms using advanced communications and technologies.

The aerospace and defence (A and D) industry today is undergoing rapid transformation as devices require increasing levels of connectivity, interoperability and reliability, combined with decreasing sise, weight, and power consumption.

Without effective development processes in place, the strict safety and interoperability requirements of the A and D industry can make the costs of innovation exorbitant.

In order to remain competitive in today's fast changing landscape, A and D manufacturers must optimise their device software development processes to rapidly build next-generation applications.

This project was competitively bid against multiple companies to provide the FCS programme with a common development environment.

Wind River's Eclipse-based development suite, Wind River Workbench, stood out for its ability to increase productivity, enable collaboration between hardware and software developers, and meet the diverse development needs of the FCS programme.

"The FCS programme sought a common software development environment that was an extensible, standards-based platform, to address a broad range of needs for its software development projects", said Paul Schoen, Director of Software for SoSCOE, FCS.

"Based on these and other defined criteria, the historical evidence of Wind River Workbench's Eclipse foundation promises a significant increase in productivity due to its flexibility, ease of use and scalability".

Wind River enables A and D manufacturers to optimise their device software development and create applications with more interoperability, safety, security and connectivity.

The company provides a fully integrated commercial off-the-shelf solution to its more than 900 A and D customers, including both an operating system and integrated development suite.

With Wind River, A and D device manufacturers can develop safety critical, standards-based, integrated, modular A and D applications faster, better, and at lower costs.

"Wind River is honoured to be part of the FCS 'One Team' - a highly-skilled task force of organisations committed to the success of the US Army's transformation initiative", said Ken Klein, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Wind River.

"As the common development suite for FCS, Wind River Workbench, along with our world-class support and specialised professional services team, stands to further solidify Wind River's position as the de facto industry standard for the A and D market".

At the heart of the FCS programme will be the world's foremost communications system and technology infrastructure.

Wind River Workbench will be applied across the programme to support the heterogeneous platforms that host the various applications.

Workbench will be used to develop the system-of-systems common operating environment (SoSCOE), as well as other FCS applications and hardware projects, including battle command (BC) software, tactical and strategic communications, and intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) sensors.

The system-of-systems common operating environment (SoSCOE) supports multiple mission-critical applications by using a nonproprietary, standards-based architecture and common commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computing hardware adapted for military applications.

Battle command (BC) software includes mission planning and preparation, situation understanding, mission execution, and warfighter-machine interface (WMI) applications.

Tactical and strategic communications provides secure, reliable access to information sources over extended distances and complex terrain.

And intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors comprise a distributed, networked array of multispectral sensors that provide a "see first" capability that is rapidly shared across the FCS network.

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