The FACE® Consortium creates and fosters Government, Industry, and Academia collaboration that encourages innovation in refining business processes and developing vendor-neutral open standards. The open standards enable software portability, reusability, and interoperability that improve affordability and reduce time-to-field software capabilities through an open architecture approach. The FACE Standards and ecosystem adhere to all five principles of a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA). They address alignment with, and improve on, achieving MOSA goals and objectives of enhance competition, rapid technology refresh, innovation, cost savings / avoidance, and interoperability.
Capabilities across Platforms
The Future Airborne Capability Environment® Technical Standard is a widely accepted, consensus-based open standard designed to promote interoperability and portability of software in avionics and other electronic systems. Today, the FACE Technical Standard reaches beyond military aviation into commercial avionics, shipboard systems, ground vehicles, uncrewed air/ground/maritime systems, training and simulation systems.
Developed by The Open Group FACE Consortium, the FACE Technical Standard provides a layered reference architecture and a set of standardized interfaces to enable the reuse of capability-based software components across different hardware computing environments. As one of the first standards aligned fully with a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), the FACE Technical Standard is publicly available at no cost and without any ITAR or other export restrictions.
Open Universal Domain Description Language (Open UDDL) is a technical standard for a formal data modeling language used to define, document, and exchange data in a clear, unambiguous way. Traditional data modeling approaches frequently rely on informal documentation or implementation-specific artifacts to convey intent, leaving critical semantics open to interpretation. UDDL was created to eliminate this ambiguity by formally documenting the meaning, context, and identity of data in a machine-readable form, enabling consistent understanding across organizations, tools, and systems. UDDL facilitates scalable interoperability by incorporating explicit constructs for measurements, units, reference frames, constraints, and conversions, thereby ensuring that exchanged data remains meaningful and valid across different environments and platforms.
The FACE Approach is a Holistic Approach that is more than just the FACE Technical Standard – it is a combination of business processes, technical practices, and open software standards designed to increase affordability and speed fielding of new capabilities. The business processes convey value and advise procurements for both government and industry. The technical practices promote the development of reusable software components. The open software standards promote the development of portable components for hosting on differing system architectures. The open software standards include both the FACE Technical Standard and the Universal Domain Description Language (UDDL) Standard, which provides the means to define data exchanges at different levels of abstraction. The FACE Approach aligns closely with the U.S. DoW Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) law, policy, and guidance, and addresses all five MOSA principles.
Learn more about how the FACE Approach addresses all five MOSA principles
Learn more about Business Guides Processes
The Open Group FACE Consortium was formed in 2010 as a voluntary consensus standards body. Its membership, composed of Government organizations, acquirers, suppliers, tool vendors, integrators, modelers, and academics, come together under a legal membership agreement which allows competitors to collaborate on issues, refine business processes, and develop vendor neutral open standards that enable software portability, reusability, and interoperability.
Membership provides distinctive benefits and delivers enduring returns on [their] technology and enterprise investments, including:
- Influencing the Technical Standards and Business Processes interacting with other implementers of the standards. That interaction can yield tremendous insight into applying the Technical Standards to your own products or programs.
- Participation in integration and test sessions, gaining lessons learned from other member organizations.
- Demonstrating your organization’s leadership and commitment to open standards and a modular open systems approach (MOSA) to deliver the latest technology innovations to the warfighter.
- Leveraging opportunities to present your organization’s products and FACE open standard solutions at high-profile Consortium and multiple industry events.
- More benefits
