Rapidly Reconfigurable Pod-Based System Survivability Suite for Air Operations in Contested Environments

SBIR topic DAF27BZ02-DV021 (U.S. Department of Defense – Air Force), Phase I and II. Open to U.S. small businesses. Opens: December 2, 2026. Closes: January 6, 2027. Modern multi-domain operational environments present increasingly agile, multi-spectral threat emitters spanning radio frequency (RF), infrared (IR), and electro-optical (EO) regimes. Conventional aircraft survivability equipment (ASE) suffers from hardwired, federated implementations, tightly coupled mechanical and electrical host dependencies, and high-latency upgrade cycles. Overcoming these barriers requires foundational research into containerized, hardware-agnostic modular payloads, high-efficiency edge processing architectures, and adaptive aperture configurations that can operate autonomously while remaining fully interoperable with joint command-and-control networks. This topic solicits applied research and experimental development into an externally carried, modular open-system survivability architecture. While leveraging mature sensing and countermeasure components where appropriate, the primary technical investigation focuses on heterogeneous compute abstraction and advanced processing architectures. This entails researching novel architectural patterns that abstract diverse federated signal processing, countermeasure arbitration, threat correlation, and cross-platform networking into a unified, modular, software-defined compute environment. Key research activities include evaluating containerization paradigms, real-time deterministic virtualization, and Open Mission Systems / Universal Command and Control Interface (OMS/UCI) standard execution under strict size, weight, power, and thermal (SWaP-C) limitations. Simultaneously, the effort must resolve multi-physics boundary constraints and sensor obscuration challenges. This requires developing high-fidelity analytical, computational fluid dynamic (CFD), and electro-optical/electromagnetic models to characterize and mitigate…