Life cycle planning from product development to long term sustainment

One of the major challenges engineers face when developing military test systems is balancing the life cycle mismatch of test equipment that's commonly deployed for 20+ years with the shorter life cycle of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components often used in those systems. To ensure long term supportability of these systems, it is important to plan for obsolescence issues starting in the product development phase and continuing through the sustaining state to end of life. Successful long term support of test systems requires careful up-front planning, a proper system architecture, and a comprehensive long term life cycle management plan. Software is becoming increasingly more important in long term sustainment as it continues to define more and more of the test system functionality. A key software architecture for mitigating the impact of obsolescence is the implementation of hardware abstraction layers (HALs). A modular software architecture, such as a HAL, is an important proactive component of a life cycle management plan that also includes traditional hardware life cycle management strategies such as sparing, obsolescence tracking and planned technology refreshes. This paper examines some of the techniques used to manage test system obsolescence through HALs and hardware life cycle management.