ChatGPT – an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot – has emerged as a potential game-changer in the adoption of AI across all industries. For aerospace and defense, it can assist in increasing automation and data-driven analysis from the supply chain to aftermarket services.

Lynx Software Technologies and RTI have successfully worked together for over two decades, with a wide range of industry design wins and use cases. As we reflect back over those years, we have found three challenges our joint customers face that Lynx and RTI address, which when combined deliver immense benefits to the creators of connected mission-critical systems.

Certifying avionics software has been, is, and always will be a daunting, time-consuming task for avionics hardware and software designers. Thanks to advances in aircraft technology, modernized software, a shift in the programming languages used, and the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technology, certification continues to get more complex. Meanwhile, technical standards such as the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) are aiding not only software certification but also overall avionics software development.

Nearly all the sought-after benefits of open system initiatives in the defense community, including U.S. Army MOSA Transformation Office, U.S. Airforce OMS, U.K. MoD Pyramid, hinge on the ability to reuse system components across platforms of different versions and/or product lines with minimal effort.

Embedded software vendors for defense applications have a confession to make: There is more they can do to support customers adopting the modular open system approach (MOSA). Current platform components are not truly portable and hidden dependencies undercut real interoperability. There is, however, a path to improve developers’ ability to realize MOSA objectives.

DevSecOps – first defined more than 40 years ago – brings a lot of value to modern development of military embedded systems, as the world sees global instability, ransomware attacks, and shortened development cycle.

It’s hard to escape the headlines around the Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), open standards, and individual initiatives such as those from The Open Group FACE Consortium, the creators of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard. In 2004, the Open Systems Task Force published a Program Manager Guide titled “A Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to Acquisition.” Since then, the industry has seen a progression in policy guidance that raised the profile of MOSA and its applicability within military systems to enable success on the battlefield while lowering acquisition costs and promoting innovation.