FACE™ Approach for Using Open Standards within Avionics Systems: Business & Technical Overview
Channel: The Open Group
Date: 02/07/2019

Learn how FACE™ enables open architecture and reduces the integration complexity and cost for avionics.  The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment Consortium is a government and industry partnership to define an open avionics environment for all military airborne platform types. 

FACE Business Overview
The FACE Approach has four powerful characteristics:
1. AFFORDABILITY.  FACE open architecture foundation drives down costs for both industry and government
2. SPEED.  The FACE Technical Standard directly enables greater speed bu using and expanding upon standards that have been proven in commercial and military platforms
3. AGILITY.  FACE uses a common data model and characterizes data according to best known practices, and it achieves higher interoperability across domains, systems and capabilities.
4. EXCELLENCE.  The FACE robust software architecture drives excellence into software design acquisition and deployment

FACE Technical Strategy
The FACE strategy is to create a software environment on the installed computing hardware of DoD aircraft (aka platforms) that enables FACE applications to be deployed on different platforms with minimal to no impact to the FACE application.

FACE Architecture is a software computing environment to enable product lines for military aviation.
-- It is comprised of a set of "places" where variance occurs
   - points of variance are called "Segments"
   - the structure created by connecting these segments together is the beginning of FACE         architecture
-- Horizontal and vertical interfaces defined as part of FACE architecture

FACE Architectural Segments
-- FACE Portable Components Segment
   - Portable Applications
   - Portable Common Services
-- Transport Services Segment
-- Platform Specific Services Segment
   - Platform Device Services
   - Platform Common Services
   - Graphics Services
-- I/O Services Segment
-- Drivers 
-- Operating System Segment

FACE certified conformant products are now available.

About FACE   https://www.opengroup.org/face
The FACE™ Consortium is a vendor-neutral forum that provides standardized approaches for using open standards with avionics systems. The FACE Consortium works to develop and consolidate the open standards, best practices, guidance documents and business models to achieve these objectives: 

• 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 warfighter faster
• Innovation and competition within the avionics industry

The FACE Technical Standard is the open avionics standard for making military computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable and secure. The standard enables developers to create and deploy a wide catalog of applications for use across the entire spectrum of military aviation 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 and emphasis on defining common language requirements for the standard.