Collaborative Air Combat will involve future air combat systems, manned or unmanned platforms, legacy platforms and their evolution, including sensors and effectors.
The EICACS project aims at ensuring the interoperability of such assets and a seamless integration of future air combat systems.
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The goals of the EICACS project are twofold:
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the promotion or development of design rules and interoperability standards,
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to ensure the interoperability of collaborative heterogeneous assets
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to support secure sharing of resources and exchange of data and information between those systems and platforms for the benefit of the mission execution and performance in systems of systems contexts
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to offer mission system software scalability to speed up integration of new capabilities
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to contribute to the interoperability of mission system execution platforms
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to define functional and physical interfaces of effectors
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to define functional interfaces of sensors
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the assessment of questions brought by the implementation of AI technologies, including:
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Airworthiness and safety issues with trustable AI-based functions
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European sovereignty over AI engineering tools, algorithm libraries and methods enabling the use of AI in military assets
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Compatibility of tools and processes for the development, the validation, the qualification and the certification of AI-driven operational services
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Expected results
The ambition of the project is to bring Collaborative Air Combat to the next step, addressing the European requirements to have highly integrated multiplatform mission management capabilities enabling:
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To operate a variety of heterogeneous assets, manned and unmanned, during air operations, including their interoperability in NATO and other coalition situations,
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To share efficiently sensors and effectors resources of manned and unmanned assets,
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To share data and information leading to informational and ultimately decisional superiority.
To make it possible, the native interoperability of heterogeneous assets, allowing “plug-and-fight” in coalition situations, is the ultimate goal. Such interoperability will require the standardisation of the exchanges between assets and also between some components of these assets. In addition, as modern warfare requires continuous evolution and ever faster integration of new capabilities while respecting financial constraints, the Collaborative Air Combat would also benefit of the evolutivity of mission system software and hardware and the integration of AI technology.
Standards
The objective is to elaborate commonly agreed standards proposals that will cover the full spectrum of capabilities required to outperform Collaborative Air Combat.
