Dynamic service integration for reliable and sustainable capability provision

Abstract

The move towards network enabled capability (NEC) by the UK Ministry of Defence is designed to achieve enhanced military effect through the networking and coherent integration of existing and future resources including sensors, weapon systems and decision-makers to achieve a more flexible and responsive military. This article addresses the existing reliability and sustainability issues of large-scale military systems and proposes new architectural approaches of dynamic service integration for NEC to adapt to evolution occurring in services and capability for constructing next-generation software-intensive military systems. The reliability and performance of the proposed architectural approaches have been verified through modelling and simulation of service-oriented architecture for NEC and demonstrated through developing and testing a NEC system for a region surveillance capability scenario. The experimental results indicate that the proposed architectural approaches provide a high level of reliability and sustainability in the provision of NEC.

Keywords:

• service-oriented architecture
• network-enabled capability
• service integration

Acknowledgements

The work reported in this article has been supported by the UK EPSRC Platform Grant: WRG Phase III EP/F0576644/1 and the NECTISE programme jointly funded by BAE Systems and the UK EPSRC grant no. EP/D505461/1.