WIRRAL, UK – September 17, 2024 – LDRA today announced it has joined The Open Group Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA™) Consortium, a vendor- and platform-agnostic forum for industry and government to collaboratively develop open standards and best practices. As a leading provider of automated software verification, source code analysis and test tools, LDRA will leverage decades of experience working on standards committees such as The Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment® (FACE®) Consortium, MISRA, DO-178 and ISO-26262 to help formalize an official SOSA conformance process and encourage innovation in the aerospace and defense industry.
The SOSA Consortium, which includes organizations such as the Air Combat Command (USAF), NAVAIR, U.S. Army CCDC C5ISR, Joint Tactical Networking Center, Collins Aerospace and Lockheed Martin, launched in 2017 to develop the non-propriety SOSA Technical Standard for sensor systems. Aligning with the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2019 modular open systems approach (MOSA) directive, the standard provides reconfigurable, evolvable and affordable capabilities for Command, Control, Communications, Intelligencer, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. For specification of the SOSA runtime environment, the SOSA Technical Standard relies on the FACE Technical Standard, another established MOSA-aligned standard that LDRA has supported since 2012 as a member of the FACE Consortium and an approved FACE Verification Authority (VA) since 2020.
“Given our extensive, hands-on experience with the FACE Technical Standard and other industry standards for the aerospace and defense industry, LDRA is uniquely positioned to help the SOSA Consortium accelerate SOSA adoption by creating a formal conformance program,” said Ian Hennell, Operations Director, LDRA. “Much like with the FACE Technical Standard, as military embedded designers conform with the SOSA standard, they can create new C4ISR systems and upgrade existing systems with innovative capabilities much more efficiently than proprietary technologies would allow. Having a formal conformance program in place facilitates the entire process, enabling organizations to deliver new applications to market faster and more cost effectively.”
The SOSA Approach incorporates specifications for software components and hardware elements, as well as electrical and mechanical interfaces composing the SOSA sensor element. SOSA-aligned services and products specifically address the needs of the aerospace and defense sectors, both of which are working on programs that must follow the DoD’s MOSA directive. Such programs include:
- Joint Tactical Terminal – Transceiver (JTT-X) (U.S. Navy)
- Ephemeral Paragon (E-Gon) (U.S. Air Force)
- Project Foxbox Blanket Purchase Agreement (U.S. Air Force)
The SOSA Consortium is developing and maturing its conformance program, improving upon the current self-certification that products are SOSA aligned, and providing further opportunities for assurance of compliance with the SOSA technical standard. Once the conformance program is formalized, LDRA expects to expand upon its FACE VA services to provide support for SOSA conformance of sensor software.
In addition to LDRA’s involvement with the FACE Technical Standard, DO-178, MISRA, ISO-26262 and now SOSA, the company has a 15-year track record of leading FAA and EASA commercial aerospace certifications.
“Not only do we know the aerospace and defense industry extremely well, but we know how to establish compliance processes as well as best practices to help military customers comply with these processes so they can ultimately achieve their time-to-market and interoperability objectives,” Hennell added. “We are firmly committed to bringing this knowledge to supporting the adoption of the SOSA Technical Standard as well.”
About LDRA
For more than 45 years, LDRA has developed and driven the market for software that automates code analysis and software testing for safety-, mission-, security- and business-critical markets. Working with clients to achieve early error identification and elimination and full compliance with industry standards, LDRA traces requirements through static and dynamic analysis to unit testing and verification for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Boasting a worldwide presence, LDRA has headquarters in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and India coupled with an extensive distributor network. For more information on the LDRA tool suite, please visit www.ldra.com.
