IS4S Selected by AFLCMC to Continue Leading the R-EGI Program
Huntsville, AL
The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) awarded IS4S with a $95M Phase 2 Other Transaction Agreement for the Resilient-Embedded Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System (R-EGI) development and prototype program.
IS4S successfully completed R-EGI phase 1, pioneering a continuous competition design agent (CC-DA) approach that brought together the best of the industry from Booz Allen Hamilton, Strategic Technology Consulting, Honeywell, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Draper, Raytheon, Kearfott, GE Aviation Systems, and other companies to develop a vendor-neutral open architecture for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) solutions. With the agile CC-DA in place, IS4S will iteratively converge the best elements from phase 1 candidate designs and government insights to produce best-of-breed prototypes.
“We’re designing R-EGI to be more than a single system,” said IS4S vice president John Larson. “We’re defining an entire ecosystem for PNT and creating a design process that AFLCMC will own. The entire phase 2 team is using modern MBSE—model-based system engineering—to develop a digital engineering toolchain in an open design which is both modular and reusable across multiple platforms.”
“This approach widens the aperture and brings the technical baseline back into the government,” added Dr. Mikel Miller, IS4S vice president for PNT. “R-EGI gives the warfighter the technology needed for tactical advantage, including the latest in alternate navigation and GPS receiver technology with M-code. As threats change, our PNT capability must also change. R-EGI enables us to outpace the threat.”
The R-EGI open architecture provides a clear framework to allow integration of new, adaptable technology and algorithms from across the Department of Defense, industry, and academia. When this open architecture is coupled with the novel CC-DA R-EGI development process, rapid adjustments can be made while achieving significant sustainability benefits over traditional acquisition approaches.
The convergence of phase 1 best-of-breed designs will produce a final government reference architecture with unlimited data rights for the government. IS4S also aims to deliver a production-ready, government-owned technical data package suitable for full and open competition, as well as production representative prototypes that demonstrate completeness and manufacturing readiness.
“This is what makes R-EGI different,” said Air Force R-EGI chief engineer, Jacob Campbell. “We’re not just building a new EGI; we build EGIs for aircraft today. We’re leveraging the best ideas, modern architectural and design approaches, open standards, digital engineering methods and tools, and cloud-based development. We are doing all this together with IS4S so we can build a dynamic, resilient-EGI.”