The InterUSS Platform recently hosted a user focus group to foster direct dialogue between InterUSS contributors and organisations actively deploying and operating InterUSS systems and services.
For this event, stakeholders from across the uncrewed traffic management (UTM) ecosystem focused on discovery and synchronisation service (DSS) performance and scalability, automated testing and community ways of working. The InterUSS Technical Steering Committee provided an overview of current work on DSS performance improvements, scalability initiatives, load testing efforts and the ongoing investigation into application-layer consensus as a future architectural direction.
The discussion included the emerging raft-based implementation being explored within the application-layer consensus effort. Participants reviewed early implementation work, performance considerations, deployment architectures and potential approaches to increase scalability while simplifying operational complexity. The workshop also examined how future DSS hosting models could support organisations seeking either to operate their own DSS infrastructure or use DSS services provided by others.
“User feedback highlighted the importance of clearly documenting deployment assumptions, supported configurations, system boundaries, scalability expectations and performance benchmarks,” InterUSS said. “Participants expressed a strong interest in making technical guidance more accessible to both implementers and regulators while ensuring platform evolution remains aligned with real-world operational needs.”
In addition to the DSS conversations, participants emphasised the importance of making information easier to discover, improving visibility into technical priorities and providing clearer roadmaps for ongoing development work. Suggestions included enhancing release communications, improving ticket categorisation, simplifying issue tracking and creating clearer feedback channels between operational users and the InterUSS community, which both the Technical Steering Committee and Outreach Committees will be undertaking.
InterUSS contributors also shared updates on ongoing efforts to improve the Automated Test Suite, enhance testing performance and expand support for future UTM verification scenarios. Discussions explored opportunities to reduce testing times through increased parallelisation, improve test environment separation and refine test scenarios to better represent operational realities. Participants also examined approaches for modelling complex behaviours and failure conditions while maintaining confidence in interoperability testing outcomes. Attendees also highlighted the operational challenges of running large-scale test campaigns and suggested more flexible approaches to test execution and troubleshooting.
In other discussions, participants examined how release communications, GitHub activity, Slack channels and community meetings could be enhanced to help users stay informed and engaged.
The conversation will continue at the next InterUSS Advisory Council and market-minded panel discussion, scheduled to take place in Tokyo, Japan, during the Harmonized Skies conference (5–6 October 2026).
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