The purpose of the Remote Instrument Control Project is to facilitate instrument PIs ability to control their instrumentation fielded on RAF aircraft from the ground. The intent is to provide bi-directional capability to allow control messages to be sent to the instrument, and to allow status messages to be returned from the instrument to the controlling software. The vision is that from the instrument provider's perspective, operation in the lab will be very similar to operation on the aircraft. Specifically, UDP communication will be supported.

Instrument PIs will be expected to write control and status messages to UDP datagrams and likewise their instruments and control software will read datagrams provided by their counterpart and act upon them. The following diagram shows how the (PI written) control software will interact with the (PI written) software in both the laboratory environment as well as in the field project environment.