The US Navy must increase its capabilities at sea without increasing the number of people on watch or overstressing these people with an increased workload, while at the same time possibly reducing the number of units fulfilling these capabilities. Towards this end, each unit must have a complete operational view of the battlespace that is shared by the other units in this space. The Navy is proposing a new Distributed Common Operational Picture (DCOP) sub-system that would be positioned alongside the combat systems applications and host combat systems. This new DCOP system will provide the software architecture and framework required to modularize and distribute the functionality needed by the individual units and to expose the capabilities provided by the various combat systems installed on a ship. The proposed DCOP framework (DCOP-FW) must provide a seamless interface to this functionality, making it readily available to client systems. It will allow runtime replacement of these and other software modules with little to no impact to ongoing operations. The framework must provide a secure, access-controlled brokerage that allows various software modules to advertise, publish, and consume data and services and also provide reliable, coherent, and fault-tolerant communications between modules, not only on the local host or platform (ship), but across platforms. During phase I, the project team will focus on analysis of the problem, consideration of various options, and design of the solution. A key requirement is that the system be able to dynamically load, remove, and replace software modules without disrupting or otherwise impacting ongoing operations. Architectural concepts will be evaluated and a solution will be designed based on this evaluation. The end result of this effort will be a design of a DCOP architecture and API and a proof of concept prototype to be demonstrated at the conclusion of the project.
Benefit: The DCOP approach falls within the command and control systems sector and represents a significant innovation over current monolithic approaches to C2. Ideally, DCOP would be deployable on wide range of existing systems and easily configurable to allow those systems to have awareness of a common set of information. This approach, if proven effective, could not only revolutionize the military battlespace but potentially impact other domains as well such as homeland security, law enforcement, and commercial applications in aviation, maritime, rail and traffic management, healthcare, manufacturing, event management, and physical security.
Keywords: Distributed Common Operational Picture, Distributed Common Operational Picture, API, C2, Architecture, Battlespace, Command and Control
