The Role of Standardization on the Journey to “Plug & Play” Weapons

From the earliest days of guided weapons, weapon designers have defined their interfaces to optimize the requirements against technologies that have been available. This has led to a plethora of different interfacing systems existing on today’s aircraft. Standards such as Mil-Std-1760 (reference 1) have sought with some success to reduce the number and variation of interfaces and thereby improve interoperability of different weapons across many platforms. The recent standardization efforts are now realizing benefits by simplifying the activities required to integrate new weapons. This has a direct impact on reducing integration programs and therefore, the costs of integrating new weapons that have such standard interfaces. But what of the future? The ultimate aim is to evolve towards a “Plug and Play” concept for weapons integration.

This paper reviews the background of weapons integration standardization and discusses the role of standards on the journey to future “Plug and Play” weapons¹.