Improving Civil-Military Information Sharing in Peace Support Operations Using a Service-Oriented Approach

摘要

Peace Support Operations (PSO) involve inter-organizational cooperation between military actors and a wide range of civilian actors such as non-governmental organizations, referred to as Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC). Effective communication and information sharing in PSO is a prerequisite for effective CIMIC, but has proven to be problematic. In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), software resources are packaged as 'services', which are well-defined, self-contained modules that provide business functionality. Services communicate with each other, requesting execution of their operations in order to collectively support a common business task or process. An analogy exists between the SOA approach and the requirements for information sharing and collaboration in the context of PSO and CIMIC. A wide range of military and civil partners cooperate loosely with one another, with each partner making its own specific contributions and collectively supporting the operation. This resembles the cooperation between a wide range of services in a SOA. This paper outlines a study initiated to investigate whether a SOA approach could improve CIMIC information sharing. Initially, a process model of CIMIC operations will be developed, building on the experiences with our work on process modelling for a C4I architecture, as presented at the 14th ICCRTS.