The Aegis program office within the program executive office for theater surface combatants and Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics & Surveillance Systems, longtime prime contractor for the Aegis combat system, are discussing a range of tasks the company expects to undertake in an effort to introduce a complete open-system software architecture for the Aegis fleet.
The new effort, referred to as "Aegis open architecture," is expected, when complete, to represent a single common baseline that will replace the mix of Aegis combat-system baselines now in service. The initiative will continue the evolution of the Aegis system, already under way, for the entire Aegis fleet of 27 Ticonderoga (CG-47)-class cruisers and about 60 Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)-class destroyers.
Program officials and requirements officers from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations are looking at ways to carry out a shipboard demonstration of open-architecture concepts through the Navy's Program Objectives Memorandum 2004.
Over the past year, Lockheed Martin has developed some exploratory open-architecture concepts through Aegis contracts already in place. Program officials say further efforts could be funded through technical instructions that modify current contracts. The Navy and the company already have collaborated extensively on transitioning the Aegis system to a commercially developed baseline of processors and software programs.
Surface ship combat-systems program officials have looked at ways of moving to common architectures in recent years to sweep away the complexity and cost of continuous software modifications. A concept called Athena, proposed in the mid-1990s to consolidate Aegis and non-Aegis systems, met widespread resistance among program officials, who objected to providing funds for a new venture.
Combat-systems officials also have advanced a concept referred to as common command and decision, or common C&D, aimed at providing a library of core combat-systems functions. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon's Naval & Maritime Integrated Systems, which is developing the ship self-defense system for aircraft carriers and Wasp (LHD-1)-class amphibious assault ships, both participated in the common C&D discussions.
The march toward commercial-off-the-shelf systems long has been viewed as a major conceptual shift for Aegis, because the Aegis system is considered the quintessential product of traditional Navy systems engineering. Surface-warfare officials have held the Aegis program to be the benchmark for management of the painstaking systems engineering and testing evolution required for the deterministic detect-track-engage sequence, for which success is nonnegotiable.
As for other defense systems, the transformation of computer-processing technology and the exigencies of budget constraints have dictated the replacement of highly reliable but obsolescent unique computer hardware and software.
The strategic shift of Aegis to commercial systems started with the introduction, with baseline 5, phase 3, of a tactical graphics capability for some Aegis display consoles, and commercial processing for the Aegis operational readiness-and-test system. It continues for baseline 6, phase 1, ships (DDG-79 through DDG-84) with the addition of four "adjunct" commercial-type processors to the Aegis display system. The adjuncts incorporate technology based on the Navy's new UYQ-70 shipboard display processor, which will represent the baseline processor design for the surface fleet.
The commercial transition continues for baseline 6, phase 3 (DDG-85 through DDG-90), which adds adjunct processors for the Aegis SPY-11) radar and the Aegis weapon system. Baseline 6, phase 3, also introduces, for the radar and the Aegis weapon system, sets of processor boards called symmetric multiprocessors that emulate for certain functions the performance of the UYK-43. Baseline 7, phase 1, will eliminate the UYK-43 computer, long the foundation of Aegis hardware.
Aegis officials point out, however, that the introduction of the UYQ-70 processor technology and commercial code does not address the inherent complexity of the software architecture, which over the years has evolved through multiple upgrades and modifications into a agglutination of software algorithms—"sphagetti code"—so tightly integrated that further modifications to specific lines of code invariably affect other code in unanticipated ways that require still more modifications to correct.
Aegis open architecture, officials say, would subsume the fielded baselines in a type of combat-system superset based on a common design that would be easily upgradable through the use of "object-oriented" modules. The new initiative postulates a design that uses middleware to segregate system applications code that controls systems functions from the processor hardware, thereby insulating both applications and hardware from the impact of any modifications needed either for the applications or the processor configuration.