Picatinny Arsenal plays key role in ensuring software reliability

By Eric Kowal and Ed Lopez, Picatinny Arsenal Public AffairsMay 2, 2016

Picatinny Arsenal plays key role in ensuring software reliability
1 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – The Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle is the U.S. Army's program to replace the Vietnam-era M113 family of vehicles. The program is deemed essential to the future of the Armored Brigade Combat Team and is expected to fulfill the Army's strategy of protec... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
Picatinny Arsenal plays key role in ensuring software reliability
2 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

PICATINNY ARSENAL, N.J. -- As the U.S. Army replaces its aging fleet of armored personnel carriers, Picatinny Arsenal is playing a crucial role in ensuring that the software for the new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, or AMPV, meets rigid standards of performance.

The AMPV is a replacement for many of the M113 armored personnel carriers in the coming years.

In 2007, the M113 program was terminated, with Army officials saying the decision was "due to inadequate force protection, its inability to incorporate future technologies due to maximized size, weight, power, and cooling, and ability to keep pace and fight" within the Army's armored brigade combat team fleet.

"The AMPV is anticipated to satisfy critical missions necessary to tackle ground combat situations alongside the ABCT [Armored Brigade Combat Team] fleet," Army officials said.

In 2014, the Program Manager Armored Multi-Purpose Personnel Vehicle, hired the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny to perform a software quality and reliability effort on the AMPV program to support product assurance and test (PA&T).

The work is being performed by engineers at the center's Quality Engineering and Systems Assurance (QESA) Directorate.

"ARDEC is certainly leading in the robust software development processes, specialty engineering discipline such as software quality, reliability and safety and CMMI Level 5 organization," said Gagan Singh, Lead Software Quality Engineer supporting PM AMPV PA&T.

Capability Maturity Model Integration, or CMMI, is a process-improvement training and appraisal program and service, and is required by many DOD and U.S. government contracts, especially in software development.

Software is playing a greater role in achieving U.S. Army capabilities in modern weapon systems. It is vital to deploy reliable software for weapon systems to be effective.

The AMPV, with 78 percent more space and two, 400-amp generators, would include mortar carrier, mission command, general purpose, medical evacuation and medical treatment variants, all on a similar chassis.

"AMPV leverages and reuses the Bradley Engineering Change Proposal 2 (ECP2) M2A4 software application code to reduce the development costs, schedule risks and to provide commonality with Bradley fighting vehicles," said Singh.

The AMPV uses common software architecture across all the AMPV variants.

The AMPV software provides capabilities that include vehicle management, driver instrumentation, position navigation, vehicle diagnostics, commander's interface with joint battle command platform, and integrating with various external radios.

The AMPV software resides and executes on the primary mounted family of computer system unit along with subset of the application on driver's smart display unit.

It interfaces with major electronic units, power management diagnostic controller, tactical cross domain, environment control system, engine/transmission control system, battery management system, portable maintenance aid and other various sensors.

The scope of the quality engineering support services to PM AMPV range across many core competencies of QESA to include software reliability assessment, software requirement specifications, software architecture and design document reviews, defect prevention, contractor process audits and formulating software quality statement to support the materiel release.

AMPV Program

ARDEC quality engineers successfully applied the SWR (software reliability) process and lessons learned on major programs such as Ground Combat Vehicles and AMPV.

"The SWR contractual statement of work and data requirement was provided to Program Management Office for the request for proposal," said Singh.

The AMPV software development lifecycle is iterative and it consists of 10 engineering cycles. The requirements phase includes developing software requirements from system use cases, analyzing them for consistency and deriving any additional software and interface requirements.

All requirements are analyzed for reliability critical and reliability related software requirements and documented on the requirement database.

"Combat mission critical software specifications are identified along with their failure impact. The reliability criticality analysis, along with software use cases, functional requirement, and operational profiles will be used to inform test case development," said Singh.

He added that the software test team is identifying all software defects and performing corrective actions on every critical or major defect.

Based on the data, AMPV software reliability metrics will be generated to evaluate software maturity.

"The software maturity trend provides a holistic view for decision makers. Finally, the reliable software build will be loaded on to AMPV prototype vehicle for reliability and production prove-out testing," said Singh.

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The U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to ensure decisive overmatch for unified land operations to empower the Army, the joint warfighter and our nation. RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.

Related Links:

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Army.mil: Science and Technology News

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