Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, addressed the recent developments in the service’s Mad Hatter program, which uses Agile software development to address issues with the F-35 aircraft’s Autonomic Logistics Information System, during an interview published Monday with Defense News.
“They already deployed several apps that are helping maintainers,†Roper said of the Mad Hatter team. “They fixed problems with the electronic equipment logs that were showing false positives, so those have been fixed, and the maintainers get to focus on things that are actually broken — not things that are reported as broken.â€
He provided updates on ALIS version 3.6 and the B-52 re-engine program as well as progress with the Advanced Battle Management System since the service hired chief architect Preston Dunlap in March. Roper said Dunlap is recording the requirements for the data architecture and that the service has started the Unified Data Library initiative as part of the ABMS program.
“I think by the time we get to our 2021 budget, ABMS should be well definitized in terms of the lines of effort, the data architecture, you know we’ll have to have a line for artificial intelligence because we are not going to be able to pass all the data collected across the networks, a networking component, and then at the end, the platforms that provided,†he added.