Mission Planning Enterprise Contract II

Mission Planning Systems provides the warfighter with the tools to plan missions and transfer required data to the aircraft avionics. Warfighters use mission planning systems to plan missions, from training to combat missions -- including weapon delivery and airdrops. Mission planning systems allows the planner to bring in data, such as maps, photos, weather, and platform performance and graphically or textually work within the mission planning system to develop a specific plan. The plan can be developed alone or in collaboration with planners for other elements of the mission, depending on the specifics of the tasking or mission. At the end of this process, the planner will have a plan and the printed or electronic materials needed for the executing platform to accomplish the mission. Typical output will include printed material for the platform operators, such as charts, communications data, flight plan, etc., and electronic material which may be loaded into a D! ata Transfer Device (DTD) for transfer of essential mission data, such as target data for weapons, missile flight paths, aircraft flight plan, etc., to platform internal electronics. For unmanned aircraft or missiles, the electronic data may be the only output. Mission Planning Systems consists of common hardware and software components required by every platform as well as individual platform-specific hardware and software components. Platform-specific components include hardware that allows the system to write or read to a DTD or software for modeling a specific platform. The Air Force has three legacy systems: the Mission Planning System [Unix-MPS] which runs on a UNIX operating system with SunSPARC hardware, Portable Flight Planning Software [PFPS] which runs on the Windows operating system, and AMC's Advanced Computer Flight Plan [ACFP] which runs its client on the Windows operating system and its servers on DEC ALPHA hardware running Tru64 UNIX. The Mission Pla! nning Systems program will replace these legacy systems with a single common system (JMPS) that allows collaborative planning. JMPS is interoperable through standardized data formats, operates on common commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) operating systems and hardware, tailors operations by adding or deleting components without doing entire system re-installs, improves efficiency by combining common functions into shared common components (CCs), and enables net-centric operations.