CIE Components in Electronics
Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connectivity company, announced that it has been selected by Infinite Dimensions Integration to provide its Transport Services Segment (TSS) Implementation, which is aligned with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard, for the development and integration of avionics systems.
The RTI TSS implementation provides a path to safety certification, a path to FACE Technical Standard conformance, and advanced debugging tools for the Resilient Embedded GPS/Internal Navigation System Prototype Pilot (R-EGI).
The FACE Technical Standard, a standard of The Open Group, promotes software reuse across disparate airborne platforms, both manned and unmanned. The R-EGI project, led by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Centre and Air Force Research Lab, is exploring using the FACE Technical Standard for avionics systems development with the goal to move toward more resilient position, navigation and timing (PNT) and alternative capabilities for the Air Force. R-EGI includes an expanded, more generic open application architecture. The goal is to rapidly prototype open system processes and open standard technology. The system can then be integrated into a production aircraft. It will also serve as an acquisition process experiment employing a community-based “Plug Fest/ Plug Test” approach to rapidly explore the design space surrounding navigation systems architecture.
RTI worked with Infinite Dimensions Integration and Green Hills Software to successfully integrate the TSS Implementation into an end-to-end vehicle control, navigation, and guidance system (for air and ground) using the US Government’s Basic Avionics Lightweight Source Archetype framework (BALSA) and Green Hills’ INTEGRITY-178 tuMP 64-Bit, multicore Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) on a Cortex A53 quad-core SOC. RTI’s TSS Implementation was selected for its clear path to safety certification, FACE Technical Standard conformance and advanced tools. RTI uniquely provides tools to help system integrators visualise, debug, and test their modular and distributed systems, offering superior insight into the system development and integration process. Additionally, RTI worked with Tucson Embedded Systems on their tool used to generate the TSS type specific code to form the R-EGI data model.
“We developed our autonomous ground and air vehicles to showcase our new approach to integrating avionics systems and thoroughly evaluating them,” said Dr. Jeffrey Wallace, CEO at Infinite Dimensions Integration, Inc. “RTI’s TSS Implementation worked nicely due to the advanced toolset and easy path to both FACE Technical Standard conformance and safety certification.”
“Our connectivity technology was designed for mission-critical systems with stringent reliability and flexibility requirements, making it an ideal solution for the R-EGI project,” said David Barnett, vice president of products and markets at RTI. “RTI is committed to working with open standards, such as the FACE Technical Standard, and the company has a long history of developing connectivity solutions for government organisations including the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. We look forward to continuing to work with Infinite Dimensions Integration to advance our software in order to ease integration and reduce costs in autonomous systems.”
About the RTI FACE TSS Implementation
RTI’s TSS technology is built on the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard developed by the Object Management Group (OMG). Serving as the communication abstraction layer in the FACE Technical Standard architecture, the TSS provides a standard interface between portable applications, common services and platform-specific services, powering easy system integration while maximising deployment flexibility.
The RTI FACE TSS Implementation makes it easy for FACE Technical Standard component developers and systems integrators to take advantage of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard. The RTI TSS implementation provides a thin software layer that maps the FACE Transport Services (TS) Application Programming Interface (API) to the DDS API supported by RTI Connext DDS products.
The RTI TSS Implementation provides loose coupling between portable components. This minimises integration, maintenance and upgrade costs. FACE Technical Standard connections are mapped to DDS publish/subscribe topics. Components communicate by simply publishing the data they produce and subscribing to the data they consume. They require no knowledge of other components. DDS automatically handles discovery and message routing. The implementation runs over any Connext DDS product. It also supports the FACE Technical Standard Safety Profile when used with Connext DDS Micro and Connext DDS Cert. Since Connext DDS Cert is certifiable to DO-178C Design Assurance Level (DAL) A, the RTI TSS provides a fast and low-risk solution for safety-critical systems.
