The objective of DARPA's J-UCAS program is to develop, demonstrate and transition an affordable, lethal, survivable, and supportable unmanned combat air system to meet the operational needs of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy.

To achieve this, J-UCAS is developing a COS that will enable interoperability among multiple air vehicles and control elements, facilitating the integration of other subsystems such as sensors, weapons, and communications.

The COS will encompass applications and services that provide command and control, communications management, mission planning, interactive autonomy and the human systems interface.

"J-UCAS is a collection of platforms, both aircraft and control elements, that are integrated by the Common Operating System," said Michael S. Francis, director of the J-UCAS program.

"The integrator/broker plays a key role in overseeing the collaboration of all technology contributors towards the successful development of the COS."

In this critical role, the Johns Hopkins team will operate as an impartial broker and potentially as an integrator within a consortium that will soon be established.

This consortium will include the program's air vehicle primes (Boeing Co. And Northrop Grumman Corp.) as well as other technology contributors to develop the COS.

The Johns Hopkins team is charged with facilitating, coordinating, and, if necessary, completing the development of the J-UCAS enterprise architecture and integration of the COS.

The group will also develop and maintain an executable J-UCAS architectural model, provide available infrastructure to support technology identification and evaluation, and maintain configuration control of Interface Control Documents and COS software releases.

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