Real-time Insights for Combat System Integration and Test

Integration, testing, and certification of surface ship combat systems of systems such as the SQQ-89 is a critical component of system development and is required prior to fielding production systems.  These activities are time consuming and costly, throttling the rate of improvement to warfighting capability. Deploying interface traffic monitoring and evaluation tools during integration and test events would allow for real-time automated root-cause analysis and reaction to any issues encountered.  This in turn would reduce the time and cost associated with engineers performing labor-intensive manual analysis. The object of this research effort is to develop an Interface Traffic Monitoring and Evaluation (IT-ME) tool to test combat system applications and their interactions through their required interfaces during integration and test activities.  The IT-ME tool consists of a monitoring layer and evaluation layer.  In the monitoring layer, message data between functional segments and external systems is monitored in real-time and prepared for processing by the evaluation layer. In the evaluation layer, prepared data from the monitoring layer is assessed in real-time to detect errors. Errors include messages out of bounds and mismatches between interface specifications. The results of these assessments can be viewed in real time by the visualization component.