A METHODOLOGY TO EVALUATE POTENTIAL OPEN ARCHITECTURE IMPLEMENTATIONS OF FUTURE WARFARE SYSTEMS WARFARE ENVIRONMENTS

A warfare system design that uses an open architecture implementation offers the possibility of reducing the life cycle costs, while making it feasible to easily incorporate advancing technology. However, the turbulent nature of the high technology market makes development and maintenance of such a system a challenging effort. The difficulty lies in accurately predicting where the commercial market will be in the near and distant future. The trick is to pick the probable market winners while avoiding the market losers. Viable solutions must maximize the synergism between the open architecture trend in the commercial market and the trend in naval warfare system development. We propose a study to define and develop an Open Architecture Stability Investigation System (OASIS) to explore the dynamic nature of the open architecture market. We will identify criteria that enable future warfare system designers to select appropriate Application Programming Interface (API) layers that provide a stable foundation for the warfare system's applications framework. We will place special emphasis upon selecting criteria to evaluate potentially viable upward migration paths for these API foundtions. This will permit the warfare system to easily incorporate advancing technology by simply upgrading selected components of their API foundation.