Development of Federated Enterprise Architecture Models for Lifecycle Knowledge Management

The objective of this project is to research, design, develop, and implement an open architecture that is based on meta models and standards for the federated management of knowledge generated over the lifecycle of weapon systems in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process. We begin with five assertions that constrain the PLM process in the Department of Defense. Given these constraints, our research hypothesis is the following: A set of web services can be architected to build on existing web services representations of the PLCS international standard to enable federated access to weapon system technical data across Army sustainment organizations and meet business requirements as delineated in the Army National Architecture. The technical objectives for this Phase I research are: 1. Fully develop the problem space, including a refinement of the constraints. 2. Research the technical literature related to PLM, PLM standards, Web Services (as applied to PLM), multi-platform application server integration, BPM (management & technical), Federated Architecture Alignment , and other areas that may be important in designing a prototype solution, 3. Refine the hypothesis, 4. Develop a requirements definition level model in a modern requirements modeling tool, and 5. Develop the appropriate documentation to support the transition to Phases II and III.