TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: ACAT 1D

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Establish a new "System of Systems" development approach that utilizes and unifies new technologies and approach to modeling, simulation, measures of effectiveness, data meanings and ontologies, the semantic web, Function Extraction, and Service Oriented Architectures for combat system development.

DESCRIPTION: Present software technologies supporting the design and operation of computing systems and applications treat individual layers and components in an isolated fashion. Protocols and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) are layered and are unified, for example, but are not tied to system data models, performance, data specifications and meaning, or data mining requirements. This isolated approach had been reasonably successful when the computing systems and the applications were relatively simple. However such approaches are inadequate in supporting the emerging complex applications and computing platforms, in which large complex systems of systems are to be designed, created, and maintained, and will interoperate with distributed, ad-hoc and unreliable Enterprise-level networks.

Bringing new technologies to the forefront of a "System of Systems" approach to combat system development would greatly increase the openness and affordability of rapid the technology transitions needed to maintain superiority. A key factor in making this transition is the task of understanding program behavior. However, today it is an error-prone, resource-intensive process carried out in human time scale, primarily through program reading and analysis. Yet fast and precise understanding of software behavior is essential, not only for discovering errors and vulnerabilities, but also for improving software specification, architecture, design, implementation, and maintenance artifacts and the development processes that produce them. Large and complex software systems are hard to understand because they contain an immense number of execution paths, any of which may contain errors or security exposures. New and future computing platforms and applications are far more advanced, powerful, dynamic and complex than in the past. Such platforms include both the globally-distributed, meta-computing, heterogeneous, networked, and adaptive platforms, ranging from assemblies of networked workstations, to networked supercomputing clusters or combinations thereof (Grids), as well as the more tightly coupled future petaflops platforms, which will be enabled as grids-in-a-box (GiBs).

Faced with massively complex systems of systems, developers often achieve no more than a general understanding of specified and unspecified (malicious or simply unintended) behaviors. This technology gap in program understanding lies at the heart of many persistent problems in software and systems engineering, and it is a major cost and schedule driver. Such complexity requires new systems' software technology for the design, development, run-time support, maintenance and management of the applications and their platforms. The new software technologies need to adopt a more integrated view of the architectural layers and software components of a computing system, consisting of: the applications, the application support environments (languages, compilers, application libraries, linker, run-time support, security, visualization, etc.), operating system (scheduling, resource allocation and management, etc), computing platform architectures, processing nodes and network layers.

PHASE I: Identify feasible approaches to adopt new technologies for combat system environments that can be used to create reference architectures and adapt to different mission areas and tactical applications. Identify standards used for data ontologies, modeling, simulation, and learning for applicability in a tool that guides the development of a mission-based architecture from the reference architecture. Provide approaches for data mining and data analysis technologies that can feed back into the process to update the reference model from the measurements of effectiveness of the system. Identify tools that begin with developing system models, data ontologies, and higher-level programming languages that can be integrated into a top-down approach for system design and maintenance of the total system architecture. Identify technologies that will provide data mediation to the larger distributed networks, supporting unreliable data exchange and ad-hoc network composition.

PHASE II: Develop a reference architecture and the tools required to derive a context-based mission architecture from the reference model. Develop a prototype architecture that incorporates selected new technologies for the replacement and improvement of legacy systems or sub-systems, based on the reference architecture and the modeling tools. Provide the assessment of the total system impact. Engage the applicable open systems standard consortiums (Object Management Group (OMG) and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS)) as applicable to promote or migrate standards.

PHASE III: Develop a fieldable system or subsystem for a sea trial that incorporates the new development process and approach capabilities. Pursue steps associated with OMG/OASIS acceptance.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: High availability, high throughput and low latency improvements to commercial data exchange standards allows time critical and real-time systems such as telecommunications, industrial automation and commerce to utilize low cost solutions.

REFERENCES:
1. Object Management Group consortium home page: www.omg.org.

2. Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards home page: www.oasis-open.org.

KEYWORDS: Semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, artificial intelligence, network, SOA, Web Technologies, real time, protocol, data mediation, baseline management.

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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