Openwings - Military Vision
“Key Enabler of Joint Vision 2020”

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has developed a vision for future war fighting called Joint Vision 2020. This vision defines the need to leverage technology and people to achieve new levels of effectiveness in Joint warfare. The future of military C4I systems is dependent on the ability to rapidly task sensors, process data into information, and disseminate that information to decision makers on the battlefield, regardless of their location.

Lessons learned from recent deployments include:

• Deployments require many individual stovepipe systems that take up excessive space and are not designed to share data or resources.
• Operation centers take too much time to setup and tear down in the field.
• System interfaces are brittle and require extensive planning and testing prior to deployment.
• Major battlefield systems do not interoperate, hindering the ability for systems to effectively collaborate.
• Systems are difficult to administrate and maintain and have become too complex for an average soldier to operate effectively.

The Vision for the Future

Distributed Operations

The battlefield of the future will likely resemble a very large Wide Area Network with every soldier and system connected via a unique IP address. Operations such as intelligence analysis and planning can be done from the safety of secure facilities at remote locations. The ability to provide these services remotely will result in deployments of smaller, more agile forces that can operate without a loss of effectiveness. The infrastructure to support distributed operations will be dependent on higher bandwidth connections, ad-hoc networking and distributed services. The distributed service-based architecture must accommodate elements that come and go in the network in a very random fashion. Openwings provides a robust, service-based framework to support this concept.

The Plug-n-Play System

The vast majority of current DoD systems were developed as point solutions to meet specific operational requirements. This approach resulted in stove-piped systems that had very little commonality and interoperability. The Defense Information Infrastructure Common Operating Environment (DII COE) addresses some of these issues, but still falls short of offering a true plug-n-play architecture.

A service-based architecture will allow systems to built using a plug-n-play mechanism for both hardware and software. Imagine being able to add a new radio into a system without having to change any software or device drivers. Similarly, software services can be added and removed via the concept of Software Service Packs. This concept provides total flexibility in system design and provides the ability to quickly reconfigure a system in the field to meet mission requirements.

For example: A quick response force is required, yet space allowances are minimal. There are several different Airborne Reconnaissance systems available. Today, commanders would have to deploy a unique ground processing system for each sensor. Openwings will enable commanders to deploy a single ground station and take just the processing elements required for the particular mission. The system can be quickly tailored to meet mission requirements.

"System of Systems"—Increased Interoperability

System interoperability was initially characterized by pre-defined, text-based messages between systems. Later definitions saw the sharing of data via direct database access. While this qpproach is a step above text messaging, it still requires a great deal of knowledge to retrieve the data from the system, process, and present the information to the operator.

Openwings greatly simplifies system interoperability. Using the service-based paradigm, the software that System A needs in order to access the services of System B is dynamically provided by System B at runtime.  This approach can go far beyond data information services. It can also extend to software tools and the sharing of hardware devices (for example: radios, printers, and processors).

Ultimately, this leads to a Plug-n-Play "System of Systems" architecture. When two or more systems come together, they have the ability to share all of their services (hardware, software, and data). When many systems come together in a Command Center, instead of having many different systems that have very limited interoperability, the elements form one logical system. The more elements added, the greater the capabilities of the system as a whole.

The vision is total flexibility, with reduced administration and greater interoperability.