A Near Real-time Service Bus for Fires and Effects Interoperability between C2, M&S, and Autonomous Systems

Recent conflicts have demonstrated that coordination between C2 devices, Modeling and Simulation (M & S) systems, and autonomous vehicles (e.g., UAV, UGV) can gain tremendous tactical advantage on the battlefield. Existing systems, however, use their own unique message formats and communication protocols (e.g., JAUS, CoT, JVMF, etc.). Fires and Effects missions bring an additional challenge because they require real-time coordination between battlefield assets and fine timing control. Therefore, integration of Fires and Effects, M & S, and autonomous systems requires a technology that meets real-time constraints. The solution must bridge different protocols and formats while maintaining the real-time latency and high throughput. Real-Time Innovations (RTI) proposes an innovative architecture to address this problem. The architecture is built on Data Distribution Service (DDS) an infrastructure designed for real-time systems. RTI"s approach will provide support for Quality-of-service (QoS)-enabled messaging, message-exchange patterns (e.g., publish-subscribe and request-reply), and other mediation functions, such as transformation, routing, aggregation, splitting, and filtering. RTI"s approach supports real-time dissemination of track updates and reliable delivery of fires and effects messages. In contrast to the conventional hub-and-spoke model of integration, RTI"s solution is fully distributed. During Phase I, RTI will demonstrate proof-of-concept interoperability between commonly-used message formats.