Service-Oriented Architecture for Naval Strike Force Interoperability Readiness

The C5I Modernization Process for Strike Force deployment represents a complex integration of data products to plan, assess, schedule and maintain configuration control over the systems and models that comprise the systems and systems-of-systems of today’s surface Navy. This process requires significant effort on the part of Program Managers to continuously update ship systems and maintain ship configurations during the modernization process. The Program Managers are operating in an environment in which databases and authoritative data sources need to be integrated in a flexible, loosely coupled way while continuing to provide operational security for data across multiple levels of security. The current monolithic architecture of the Navy Data Environment (NDE) does not lend itself to scale to arbitrarily large sets of data. Significant effort is involved with integrating new data sources, not the least of which is that Program Managers must now maintain data in yet another location. Translators become “stovepiped”. That is, they need to be created for each data source brought into the process and the process must be modified to support the new data. A new solution is required that will allow new data to be integrated seamlessly into the established C5I Modernization Process. This solution must take advantage of emerging concepts that establish processes and protocols for communication and action between net-centric applications. These concepts involve the modularization of tasks into a loosely coupled array of services from which individuals, software agents, or other services can access and update service data. This is known as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The purpose of this proposal is to provide the Navy with a new architecture for a process in support of the emerging needs of the C5I Modernization Process (C5IMP). This architecture (SOA) must provide for the inclusion of a loosely coupled array of services which may interoperate with each other or be accessed by either software agents or other decision makers involved in the C5IMP. Under this effort Trident Systems will develop a Service Oriented Architecture product that includes support for static state services and Multi-Level Security (MLS). This product will be known hereafter as the SOAMLS Architecture.