SBIR-STTR Award

The downsizing of the Department of Defense (DoD) and shrinking military budgets have highlighted the need for DoD business process innovation, automation, and reuse. Collaboration is an increasingly effective way to automate and distribute business processes throughout an enterprise to reach higher levels of productivity. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Collaborative Enterprise Environment (CEE) provides a standard collaboration operating environment that has been effective in leveraging distributed, disparate resources and achieving collaboration among distributed participants. As the successes of the CEE are increasingly realized, the size, scope, and frequency of collaboration executions will grow, and as they do, so will the difficulty managing these complex distributed systems. With collaboration execution often times segmented geographically, the inability to visualize distributed collaborative resources, such as computers, network devices, communication connections, agents and other collaboration participants makes fault detection and correction a significant challenge. The benefits being realized through distributed collaboration and the CEE only underscore the importance of robust tools for managing and monitoring enterprise collaborations to ensure continued realization of the benefits. The Virtual Technology Corporation (VTC) Team proposes to develop a collaboration enterprise resource management and monitoring tool based on VTC's commercial hlaControl? product.

The downsizing of the Department of Defense (DoD) and shrinking military budgets have highlighted the need for DoD business process innovation, automation, and reuse. Collaboration is an increasingly effective way to automate and distribute business processes throughout an enterprise to reach higher levels of productivity. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Collaborative Enterprise Environment (CEE) provides a standard collaborative operating environment that has been effective in leveraging distributed, disparate resources and achieving collaboration among distributed participants. As the successes of the CEE are increasingly realized, the size, scope, and frequency of collaboration executions will grow, and as they do, so will the difficulty managing these complex distributed systems. With collaboration execution often times segmented geographically, the inability to visualize distributed collaborative resources, such as computers, network devices, communication connections, agents, and other collaboration participants makes fault detection and correction a significant challenge. The benefits being realized through distributed collaboration and the CEE only underscore the importance of robust tools for managing and monitoring enterprise collaborations to ensure continued realization of the benefits. The Virtual Technology Corporation (VTC) Team proposes to develop a collaboration enterprise resource management and monitoring tool based upon VTC's commercial hlaControl(tm) product.

Benefits:
The ATEAM will provide an automated tool, process, and visualization capability for managing distributed CEE physical resources such as networks, computers, Product Data Models (PDMs), databases, applications, software agents, scientists, engineers and other collaborative participants. Following CEE standards, the ATEAM tools will consist of Java-based, platform-independent tools capable of visualizing the topology, status, and components of a CEE event using a variety of 2D/3D displays and controls. With ATEAM, CEE collaboration managers will be able to: 1) view a topological representation with geographic and facility map overlay of the CEE enterprise showing the location and connectivity of the systems that are executing the enterprise resources; 2) display pertinent system statistics on these resources; 3) monitor the status of key CEE components like the various system agents and databases; 4) remotely monitor the enterprise state with hand held devices such as Palm Pilots, PocketPCs, and Web Phones through leading edge technologies such as wireless standards IEEE 802.11b, Bluetooth, and WAP; and 5) other configuration and system management functions. The ATEAM system will add a much-needed capability for control and visualization of the CEE system.