Service-Oriented Architectures, Network-Centric Warfare, and Agile, Self-Synchronized C2: Impacts to Data Fusion Process Design.

摘要

One of the primary if not the central motivating rationale for Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) is that NCW provides an enabling mechanism for information sharing and shared understanding and awareness of military situations of interest, that in turn allows the realization of entirely new concepts of C2 that are advertised as providing greatly increased agility, speed of command, and synchronization in C2. In turn, the underlying enabling IT mechanism for NCW is the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept, within which all functional services, to include Data Fusion Services, will presumably operate. These attractive but as-yet-not-fully-defined concepts represent a challenge to the Data Fusion community in terms of understanding the implications of the evolving NCW, SOA, and new C2 concepts on the design of Data Fusion Services. Key to this understanding in particular is the need for a close dialog with the C2 research community on exactly what the information needs of new C2 concepts will be and how those needs can best be met by appropriately-designed Data Fusion Services. This talk will address each of these issues and argue for the need for both: (1) a multi-community approach to the architecting of effective and efficient SOA's, and (2) for new initiatives in distributed Data Fusion to address the specific technical challenges of NCW- specific Data Fusion Service design and implementation. (It should be noted that this paper is drawn largely from US literature and so presents a US-based viewpoint developed by the author; the paper does not represent any official US governmental views.) This brief paper is intended to sketch the topical areas that will be addressed in the associated Keynote speech.