Creating software to keep naval systems always-on

“Companies like Tesla have set a new standard in software development. With a mere update over the air, they’re able to cut 6 meters off their cars’ braking distance at 100 km/h. That’s really something – we’re talking about millions of vehicles that have to remain safe to drive,” says René van Hees from Thales. “Who’d have thought five years ago that we’d be changing the functionality of our critical systems on the fly?”

Chief software architect Van Hees is pushing hard to adopt a similar approach for naval systems. “We’re becoming much more software-intensive as well, with software playing an increasingly important role in our radars. New features are more and more enabled by software, while the hardware remains more or less the same. We’re heading towards a future where, once we’ve deployed a system on a ship, we’ll be adding functionality exclusively through software updates.”