The new thing we have been introducing on the safety side is a multi-core support for safety

Interview with WindRiver

Spokesperson:

1. Alex Wilson, Director of Business Development, Aerospace & Defense, Wind River
2. Dinyar Dastoor, Vice President and General Manager, Operating Systems Platform, Wind River
3. Guruprasad MP, Head of A&D sales in India.

 

Please give us a few insights on Wind Forum 2016

Wind Forum 2016 focussed on accelerating innovation in the Aerospace and Defence sectors. We have particularly been focussing on the creation of broad topics giving emphasis to the applications of IoT in aerospace and defense. One of the practical applications of IoT on the A&D front is net-centric warfare and Wind River has been discussing the same on a deeper level through this edition of Wind Forum.

We also had guest speakers ranging from industry experts to customers giving their opinions and insights on how to enhance growth in the domain. We were also able to give the attendees hands on approach to understanding the technology through technical sessions and live product displays.

Can you discuss the latest safety and security trends in Aerospace and Defence segment?

I will break the question into two parts and explain the safety and security aspects separately. As you can imagine, safety and security are two critical features for the A&D industry. Safety becomes an inevitable aspect of the Avionics or the Aerospace industry and we have been working towards introducing a multi-core support for safety.  So, when you are flying in aircraft, those boards are now coming on as multi-core boards and how safety at BMS is using those multi-core chips. On the security side, support for Defence has a much heightened value and I can give you examples on this.

In a defence organisation, they can either do their own proprietary infrastructure of communication which in a way becomes very expensive because you have to spend your own network or the other option is you could use the public infrastructure. It’s already available but if you could secure things over your public infrastructure enough, then you get lot of benefits. You get benefits of lower cost of communication, standard equipment and so on. So, one of the innovations that has happened from a security stand point is how could defence establishments use public infrastructures. When I say public, I mean freely available network and also secure their data. That’s one example of it and research focusses on exploring more possibilities of the topic.

How is IoT utilized in the aerospace and defence industry? What are the potentials of IoT in Aerospace and Defence segment?

As a background, defence industry has been using connected devices for quite some time and they have been connecting battle tanks, warships etc. So, in a way IoT should not be different and complex for them but the difference comes in here as connectivity and its options are very proprietary. In fact they were so proprietary that between the armed forces, you would be using different connections. So, may be the army or the air force can be using different ways of communicating. The issue that crops up with this situation is that there exists no standardization in terms of communication and connectivity.

There are a lot of connectivity options offered on the commercial side with the evolution of internet of things. Now many of these technologies are bleeding into the defence sector and innovation is made possible through such exposures. So as an example, if you wanted the logistics of a battle field tracked via IoT then all these government vehicles, for example, can be fitted with sensors. This connectivity enables the forces to monitor and see data on the location, status and working health of the machine. These inputs also get recorded onto a larger system and high tech data analysis is done. Logistically any requirement for an operational modification can be performed in a predictive manner. This would ensure that all the defence equipment out on the field will be in perfect shape and any failure or error can be predicted and repaired through this technology. This is only one of the many practical applications of IoT in defence.

What are the special equipments available for the Indian Defence Industry and how IoT will be helpful in the sector?

Particularly as opposed to the defence sectors around the world, Indian defence has a lot of scientists looking at the prospects of research and development. One of the biggest applications that could help the Indian defence industry would be the ability to give and utilize commercial off the shelf protocols. This would again help in terms of saving effort and resources on developing new proprietary tools. We also work with many defence labs and we continue to receive positive feedback and support on doing this kind of research on the connectivity aspect.

There is another big “Make in India” initiative which requires the Battlefield Management System (BMS) program. This is one of the programs we are hoping to partner with some of the system integrators in the country which essentially would focus on IoT solutions that can be extended for military applications. This concept could lead to soldiers carrying hand-held computers and there is a network communication between the soldiers and the commander of commanders. There is already a plan by the government which is to deploy such a system and the kind of solutions we have will make the implementation of this requirement easier for system integrators.

What is Wind River’s focus and strategy for this space focussing on IoT solutions?

Aerospace and Defence for Wind River has been a very significant part of the business world-wide across all the four continents. And so basically our focus is for providing partners with software platforms that are highly safe and secure. The next generation of focus is all about safety and security but further emphasises on how you canconnect these devices between themselves and then inter-connect into a private or public cloud. This is an area of importance and we give due emphasis and research on the same.

Do you have any latest developments for research in the Aerospace and Defence industry?

There are many noticeable developments on research in the A&D industry. So, one of the product lines that we have been researching on are high availability servers with maximum security. If you can imagine like a Google or an Amazon have lot of servers which have high availability but they are all in the public domain. This directly means that you cannot have these stored on to your local system. At this point, we do recognize the fact that in the face of areas like defence and aerospace there might be hesitancy for using public cloud services.

Wind River has been investing in the creation cloud infrastructure which is highly reliable andhas fail-over mechanisms inside. These cloud servers can then be deployed for safe and secure use in such environments.

Consider this case, if somebody wanted a cloud server in an airplane or in your premises or base camp, we would be able to provide that and have technology that enables us in deploying the same. More importantly this server solution pipe into our larger end to end offering for IoT defence kind of implementation. This further enhances our ability to support system integrators for the BMS program I was referring to earlier and contributes to the overall development of the industry.