Force Level Resource Coordination for the Integrated Combat System

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) will develop and demonstrate a suite of prototype software services to enable force-level resource sharing within the Integrated Combat System (ICS). A general-purpose (domain independent) Resource Coordinator service will be developed to provide a reusable implementation of the common coordinator functions of the Hierarchical Resource Coordination model. This service will employ a flexible “personality plug-in” interface to a companion domain-specific service which can tailor to behavior of the abstract Coordinator to the particular domain. A personality plug-in service will be developed for the external communications (EXCOMM) domain, aimed at supporting the Communications as a Service (CaaS) capability to provide flexible inter-node communication channels for ICS applications. Finally, a collection of inter-Coordinator protocols (employing the UC2 message standard) will be developed to negotiate and manage the sharing of various types of resources (sensors, effectors, offboard assets, and application tasking) across the ICS nodes of a battlegroup.