This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 9849, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction (if any), and Conference Committee listing.

The Sensor Open System Architecture (SOSA) is a C4ISR-focused technical and economic collaborative effort between the Air Force, Navy, Army, the Department of Defense (DoD), Industry, and other Governmental agencies to develop (and incorporate) technical Open Systems Architecture standards in order to maximize C4ISR sub-system, system, and platform affordability, re-configurability, overall performance, and hardware/software/firmware re-use. The SOSA effort will effectively create an operational and technical framework for the integration of disparate payloads into C4ISR systems; with a focus on the development of a functional decomposition for common multi-purpose backbone architecture for radar, EO/IR, SIGINT, EW, and communications modalities. SOSA addresses hardware, software, and mechanical/electrical interfaces. The functional decomposition will produce a set of re-useable components, interfaces, and sub-systems that engender re-usable capabilities. This, in effect, creates a realistic and affordable ecosystem enabling mission effectiveness through systematic re-use of all available re-composed hardware, software, and electrical/mechanical base components and interfaces.

The objective of the Agile Manufacturing for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (AMISR) effort is to research, develop, design and build a prototype multi-intelligence (multi-INT), reconfigurable pod demonstrating benefits of agile manufacturing and a modular open systems approach (MOSA) to make podded intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability more affordable and operationally flexible.

The much-anticipated revolution of the “Internet of things” (IoT) is expected to generate one trillion internet devices within the next 15 years, mostly in the form of simple wireless sensor devices. While this revolution promises to transform silicon markets and drive a number of disruptive changes in society, it is also the case that the protocols, complexity, and security issues of extremely large dynamic, co-mingled networks is still poorly understood. Furthermore, embedded system developers, to include military and aerospace users, have largely ignored the potential (good and bound) of the cloudlike, possibly intermingling networks having variable structure to how future systems might be engineered. In this paper, we consider a new interpretation of IoT inspired modular architecture strategies involving the representational state transfer (REST) model, in which dynamic networks with variable structure employ stateless application programming interface (API) concepts. The power of the method, which extends concepts originally developed for space plug-and-play avionics, is that it allows for the fluid co-mingling of hardware and software in networks whose structure can overlap and evolve. Paradoxically, these systems may have the most stringent determinism and fault-tolerant needs. In this paper we review how RESTful APIs can potentially be used to design, create, test, and deploy systems rapidly while addressing security and referential integrity even when the nodes of many systems might physically co-mingle. We will also explore ways to take advantage of the RESTful paradigm for fault tolerance and what extensions might be necessary to deal with high-performance and determinism.

Modern warfare has drastically changed from conventional to non-conventional and from fixed threats to dynamic ones over the past several decades. This unprecedented fundamental shift has now made our adversaries and their weapons more nebulous and ever changing. Our current acquisition system however is not suited to develop, test and deploy essential capability to counter these dynamic threats in time to combat them. This environment requires a new infrastructure in our system design to rapidly adopt capabilities that we do not currently plan for or even know about. The key to enabling this rapid implementation is Open Architecture in acquisition.

The DoD has shown it can rapidly prototype capabilities such as unmanned vehicles but has severely struggled in moving from the prototyping to deployment. A major driver of this disconnect is the lack of established infrastructure to employ said capability such as launch and recovery systems and command and control. If we are to be successful in transitioning our rapid capability to the warfighter we must implement established well defined interfaces and enabling technologies to facilitate the rapid adoption of capability so the warfighter has the tools to effectively counter the threat.

Critical to reaping the benefits of an Open System Approach within Defence, or any other sector, is the ability to design the appropriate commercial model (or framework). This paper reports on the development and testing of a commercial strategy decision support tool. The tool set comprises a number of elements, including a process model, and provides business intelligence insights into likely supplier behaviour. The tool has been developed by subject matter experts and has been tested with a number of UK Defence procurement teams.

The paper will present the commercial model framework, the elements of the toolset and the results of testing.

The growing number of events affecting public safety and security (PS&S) on a regional scale with potential to grow up to large scale cross border disasters puts an increased pressure on agencies and organisation responsible for PS&S. In order to respond timely and in an adequate manner to such events, Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) organisations need to cooperate, align their procedures and activities, share the needed information and be interoperable. Existing PPDR/PMR technologies such as TETRA, TETRAPOL or P25, do not currently provide broadband capability nor is expected such technologies to be upgraded in the future. This presents a major limitation in supporting new services and information flows. Furthermore, there is no known standard that addresses interoperability of these technologies.

In this contribution the design of a next generation communication infrastructure for PPDR organisations which fulfills the requirements of secure and seamless end-to-end communication and interoperable information exchange within the deployed communication networks is presented. Based on Enterprise Architecture of PPDR organisations, a next generation PPDR network that is backward compatible with legacy communication technologies is designed and implemented, capable of providing security, privacy, seamless mobility, QoS and reliability support for mission-critical Private Mobile Radio (PMR) voice and broadband data services.

The designed solution provides a robust, reliable, and secure mobile broadband communications system for a wide variety of PMR applications and services on PPDR broadband networks, including the ability of inter-system, interagency and cross-border operations with emphasis on interoperability between users in PMR and LTE.

The overarching objective for Flexible Weapons is to replace current inventory weapons that will not fully utilize the increased capabilities of 6^th generation platforms, with a single weapons kit made up of flexible, open architecture components. Flexible Weapon will develop a common architecture to enable modular subsystems to achieve flexible weapons capability while allowing technology refresh at the pace of technology discovery in an affordable and sustainable design. The various combinations of weapons to address multiple missions must be 100% compatible with 6^th generation delivery platforms (fighters, bombers, RPAs) and backwards compatible with 4^th and 5^th generation platforms.

Throughout the Department of Defense (DoD), acquisition, platform integration, and life cycle costs for weapons systems have continued to rise. Although Open Architecture (OA) interface standards are one of the primary methods being used to reduce these costs, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office (AFRCO) has extended the OA concept and chartered the Open Mission System (OMS) initiative with industry to develop and demonstrate a consensus-based, non-proprietary, OA standard for integrating subsystems and services into airborne platforms. The new OMS standard provides the capability to decouple vendor-specific sensors, payloads, and service implementations from platform-specific architectures and is still in the early stages of maturation and demonstration. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) - Sensors Directorate has developed the Blue Guardian program to demonstrate advanced sensing technology utilizing open architectures in operationally relevant environments. Over the past year, Blue Guardian has developed a platform architecture using the Air Force's OMS reference architecture and conducted a ground and flight test program of multiple payload combinations. Systems tested included a vendor-unique variety of Full Motion Video (FMV) systems, a Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) system, a multi-mode radar system, processing and database functions, multiple decompression algorithms, multiple communications systems, and a suite of software tools. Initial results of the Blue Guardian program show the promise of OA to DoD acquisitions, especially for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) payload applications. Specifically, the OMS reference architecture was extremely useful in reducing the cost and time required for integrating new systems.