The U.S. Air Force has applied open architecture and agile models toward updates of its ground infrastructure for analysis and processing of data collected from military sensors, drones and manned aircraft, Federal News Radio reported Wednesday.
Jared Serbu writes the Air Force Research Laboratory last year built an open prototype of the Distributed Common Ground System with the intent to help the military service embed plug-and-play tools into the platform.
The military branch plans to test the open architecture-based DCGS at five locations this year.
Col. Bruce Lyman, chief of ISR for the Air Force’s DCGS, was quoted as saying agile methodology will “allow us to not only take new technology and very quickly give that to our analysts, but to add those capabilities in parallel instead of waiting for years and years to go through the usual requirements and acquisition process.”
The Air Force used the ground intelligence platform to test a rapid acquisition approach last year through the PlugFest Plus experiment, which involved a consortium of non-traditional vendors and use of other transaction authority, Serbu reports.