Current and projected program requirements are exceeding Department of Defense (DoD) budget and schedule constraints. This applies to the Army’s requirements to integrate common avionics equipment onto dissimilar rotorcraft – both manned and unmanned. As such, innovative approaches are needed to address the integration costs and time. The Common Software Initiative (CSI) was formed by the U. S. Army’s Product Manager of Aviation Mission Equipment (AME) to explore solutions for this problem.
In support of CSI, Capability Driven Architecture (CDA) has been architected and demonstrated to AME as an architecture designed for reuse. It is an open-standards based architecture for integrating and deploying new and legacy capabilities and avionics onto Army rotorcraft. The planned goal for CDA is 100% reuse, such that one piece of software may be certified and reused across multiple platforms as described in the FAA circular AC 20-148 [1]. The CDA architecture can be applied to all capabilities including communications, navigational, sensors, actuators, etc., and, as a proof of concept, it was first developed and demonstrated for radio control as CDA Radio Control (CDA-RC).