Future Airborne Capability Environment™ (FACE) Introduction
Channel: The Open Group
Date: 2020-10-13

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. The FACE™ Consortium is a vendor-neutral forum that provides standardized approaches for using open standards with avionics systems.

The FACE Technical Standard defines a Reference Architecture designed to eliminate barriers of portability and encourage the development of reusable software.
The FACE Segments abstract functionality to promote portability.
The FACE Technical Standard defines a set of best practices for creating FACE software components.

FACE Approach: to develop a Technical Standard for a software Common Operating Environment (COE) designed to promote portability and create software product lines across the military aviation domain.

Aspects of the FACE Approach:
* Business processes to adjust procurement and incentivize industry
* Technical practices to promote development of reusable software components
* A software standard to promote the development of portable components between differing avionics architectures

The FACE Technical Standard provides:
* A software approach designed to tackle barriers to modularity, portability, and interoperability.
* Reference Architecture that uses standardized interfaces and provides requirements for developing software components that will reside in architectural ‘segments’
* FACE Data Architecture for describing data and its semantics IDL definitions for FACE Interfaces
* Programming Language Mappings from IDL to the following languages:
C, C++, Ada, Java
* Set of OS Profiles based on level of criticality (General Purpose, Safety, and Security)

Speaker: Christopher Crook, Sr. Software Analyst, PEO Aviation, U.S. Army
Christopher Crook is a Senior Software Analyst supporting Program Executive Office (PEO) Aviation (AVN). He develops technical solutions and provides guidance in the areas of open system architectures, as well as new airborne technologies. Christopher began his career in the United States Army, serving in the Air Defense Artillery branch for seven years. Since then, he has provided software analysis and development support to various programs and platforms within the Missile Defense Agency’s Ground and Flight Test program. Prior to moving to aviation, his last position was as a member of a software review board for the Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Product Office. 

Christopher has been an active participant of the FACE Consortium for five years as a member of both the Technical Working Group (TWG) and the Integration Workshop Standing (IWS) Committee. He currently serves as the TWG Chair, and served as the TWG Vice-Chair for the 2019-2020 period.

Christopher holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Computer Science from Troy University, and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University.