Hardware Agnostic Approach to TPS Life Cycle Sustainment

Lockheed Martin simulation, training and support (LM-STS) has developed an innovative "hardware agnostic" technical approach to protect the TPS investment from hardware obsolescence. LM-STS developed a set of instrument translators that determine the intent of the legacy TPS call at runtime. Equivalent calls to the LM-STAR^reg system software are then made to achieve the desired functionality utilizing the new replacement hardware instead of the obsolete legacy hardware. Lockheed Martin missiles and fire controls (LM-MFC) also had requirements to have one set of TPS source code and one set of built TPS that were capable of running legacy and new hardware configurations. Having a controlled set of TPS for the legacy configuration and yet another for the new configuration was deemed too costly and risky. LM-MFC desired to move the TPS from a legacy system to the new system by using intelligent underlying system software capable of performing the appropriate action depending on the hardware configuration. This paper will describe our technical approach to supporting legacy and new hardware configurations via instrument translators without impacting the TPS and present our experience in rehosting LM-MFC TPS utilizing our LM-STAR^reg system software architecture.