The ability to embrace change was one of the important factors taken into account while designing Gripen E. The fighter, with its smart split avionics, has separated flight-critical and mission critical parts. This allows quick, easy updates without the need to recertify the flight-critical parts. Furthermore, all components are logically separated so as with the iPhone, the software “apps” can be removed, replaced, or upgraded without affecting the others. It also enables hardware to be upgraded without having to change the software.
This means that systems updates can be made much faster, at less cost and at less risk. Changing core computers or software, which usually takes years or decades, would be done in days or months. As a result, any new technology can be integrated as and when available, with unpanelled seamlessness.
The speed and ease with which new changes are incorporated in Gripen can be explained with an example from the area of Human Machine Collaboration, an area which is rapidly progressing and new innovative functionality can become available on an almost daily basis. As soon as adversaries change their tactical behavior or new threats are identified, the Gripens AI-enabled decision support suite will be upgraded to sustain a superior situational awareness and combat effectiveness. Such changes would take merely hours to be incorporated throughout the operator´s entire Gripen fleet.
That was from an article on the Saab website. Here’s more on that, including how Saab has scaled agile teams to the enterprise.
One of the problems with modular architecture is that each component has access to everything through the global standard, which can have major safety/security implications. Separating flight and mission software is critical so that quick updates to mission will not impact flight operations, which can often be done by allowing “read” access without “write” privileges. This works well for human-machine teaming, but if you want full autonomy of the aircraft then the mission systems will have to be able to “write” to the flight software, which brings more complexity but also less risk since there’s not a human at risk.
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