The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has decided to move away from legacy ground based radars to a system that relies on satellite navigation to provide aircraft their location and transmit that to ATC via transponders. The transponder system used by this NextGen ATC is known as the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). The requirements for ADS-B will encompass all aircraft, including military, flying in controlled airspace in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Some military aircraft are 40+ years old and rely on legacy technologies and protocols to function. Integrating the F-16 into the NextGen system of systems presents several integration challenges and will require unique design, integration, and testing solutions. To combat integration challenges, the program offices are pursuing custom solutions using the teams of contractors that are already in place to develop previous technology. New software is being written to update pilot vehicle interfaces (PVI) to allow for control of ADS-B information flow. New transponder and interrogator software is being written to piggy back on existing Mode-S functionality, and update it to use ADS-B. New navigation software is being written to directly talk between navigation subsystems and transponder subsystems. The time and money will be worth the effort, but any schedule delay could mean ADS-B does not field with the rest of F-16 capabilities or meet the 2020 FAA requirements. This paper will go more in detail about the integration challenges with software intensive systems, and hopefully how we will solve them to successfully integrate ADS-B in legacy fighter aircraft (F-16, etc.). Human-system integration will be a key factor to make this new requirement transparent to the warfighter. It will also give some insight into the beginning parts of the life cycle management challenges facing the program, and how those will impact both the flight test portion of ADS-B and the final integration to the fleet of aircraft.
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