2007 Issue 3 - Raytheon

Leveraging Technology to Realize
Service-Oriented Architectures
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is
a well-established strategy within the
Department of Defense for meeting
the transformational goals of net-centric
warfare (NCW). By exposing capabilities to
the Global Information Grid (GIG), the
warfighter achieves information superiority
through his ability to discover, view and act
on information and capabilities previously
hidden within systems, effectively breaking
traditional stovepipes.
This transformational goal can be realized
without impacting functionality in the field
through a phased migration strategy combining
current technology with key technology
insertions. Raytheon Effects/Battle
Management Systems (E/BMS) has been
migrating C2 systems of record and related
products toward NCW SOA goals over the
last 10 years.
Migrating a Current Force System Into
an SOA Environment
Current force systems can be migrated into
an SOA using several approaches ranging
from exposing or adapting interfaces to
refactoring the system architecture. On the
Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data
System (AFATDS), we are using multiple
approaches to achieve this migration.
AFATDS is the Fire Support Command and
Control (C2) system employed by the U.S.
Army and U.S. Marine Corps units to provide
automated support for planning, coordinating,
controlling and executing fires and
effects. It prioritizes targets received from
various sensors and performs attack analysis
using situational data combined with commander’s
guidance. The result is timely,
accurate and coordinated fire support
options to engage targets using Army,
Marine, Navy and Air Force weapon systems.
Enhanced by an SOA, these capabilities
will enable an expanded warfighter
audience to make timely decisions for joint
target engagement and synchronization.
Figure 1. Web services that support the Joint Time Sensitive Targeting Thread
Shortly after AFATDS was fielded in 1996,
Raytheon and the Army product manager
for the Fire Support Command and Control
(PdM FSC2) office collaborated to develop
the Effects Management Tool (EMT) to provide
AFATDS capabilities to remote users. At
that time, a client-server architecture using
Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (CORBA) Interface Definition
Language (IDL) was created, establishing
the foundation for our subsequent SOA
migration strategy.
As NCW concepts emerged, Advanced
Concept Technology Demonstrations
(ACTD) exercises and experiments focused
on realizing the tenets of NCW and SOA
primarily through Web-service technology.
In 2004, AFATDS began transitioning the
CORBA IDL interface to Web services, as
well as defining new Web services as part
of the Family of Interoperable Operational
Pictures (FIOP) initiative and the Joint Forces
Feature
Command (JFCOM), J9 Joint Fires Initiative
(JFI) Limited Objective Experiment (LOE).
These services were further refined through
participation in various other activities and
experiments that focused primarily on the
Joint Time Sensitive Targeting (TST) Thread.
The relationship of the AFATDS Web services
to the TST thread is depicted in Figure 1.
By leveraging these experimental results,
the AFATDS program has already fielded
selected Web services. Moreover, it will field
enough Web services in its next major
release (early 2008) to completely replace
the original CORBA IDL.
Incremental Migration Strategy to
Realize SOA Goals
The creation of Web services by itself does
not fully realize an SOA. Additional aspects
include defining meta-data for search and
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RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY 2007 ISSUE 3 11