Situational Awareness for Mission Critical Ship System

IERUS proposes the realization of an advanced dynamic mission planner software application developed, tested, and deployed through a modern Development, Security, and Operations (DevSecOps) software process. Current Aegis Weapon System (AWS) Software (SW) applications, such as Aegis Mission Planner (MP), are part of the Common Source Library (CLS) in which the OEM Prime contractor performs integration, maintenance, testing, and deployment through a rigorous and time-consuming process, often taking years from feature requirement development to the release of the updated build to the fleet. Applying modern SW development processes, when combined with Model Based System Engineering (MBSE), cloud based microservices architectures, and platform virtualization, can shorten the SW release cycle improving adaptability and flexibility of Naval weapon systems. IERUS offers the continued development of our Integrated Combat System Automated Resource Sharing (ICARS) SW application, leveraging the work of the previous SBIR phases and other efforts, to provide the Navy with advanced mission planning capability, and demonstrate rapid SW development cycles through testing with virtualized platforms. The future engagements with a near peer adversary capable of a coordinated raid missile attack requires automated fleet resource coordination to achieve missile defeat. This coordination can be achieved through dynamic tasking which leverages automated resource sharing doctrine developed for a fleet level mission plan. ICARS is an enabling technology which produces optimal force level mission plans and dynamic doctrine necessary to fight as a fleet. ICARS has been demonstrated to create multi-ship mission plans, including the tactical level senor and weapon tasks for AWS which can enable automated resource sharing. The ICARS mission planning algorithms optimize for multiple air threat regions, launch areas, and defended areas as well as multi-mission Aegis platforms. ICARS has been previously demonstrated to integrate with an Aegis Virtual Twin through a provided middleware service which interfaces with the CSL internal RTI-DDS messages. The ICARS mission plan and tactical sensor and weapon tasks were accepted by the AWS and executed through simulation. This effort will continue the development, integration, and test of the ICARS application through the Navy software modernization efforts under project Minos. The integration of the ICARS application and the IERUS development team within the Black Pearl environment will ultimately lead to the development of an Automated Test and Retest (ATRT) pipeline. This ATRT pipeline development is expected to be a follow-on effort under a Phase 3 SBIR contract vehicle. This proposed effort leads through a demonstrated integration with the virtual platform through a modern DevSecOps pipeline within the Black Pearl environment as the steppingstone necessary prior to ATRT development.