Language of Interoperability
LANGUAGE OF INTEROPERABILITY
An alliance of government, industry and academia is working to
develop a software language, known as Battle Management Language, that will
help to connect command and control, GIS and simulation systems together.
By Erin Flynn Jay
An alliance of government, industry and academia is working to
develop a software language, known as Battle Management Language, that will
help to connect command and control, GIS and simulation systems together.
By Erin Flynn Jay
Battle Management Language initiative links geospatial information, command and control and simulation.
An alliance of government, industry and academia is working to develop a software language that will help to connect command and control, GIS and simulation systems together.
The initiative for interoperability for C2, simulation and geospatial services, known as Battle Management Language (BML), was the subject of a conference this past fall, and is expected to develop into an ongoing effort. The meeting was sponsored by the George Mason University (GMU), Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), ESRI, MÄK Technologies and Systematic Software Engineering Inc.
Participants included representatives from Canada, France and Israel, as well as from 15 government organizations and 29 companies. "We were pleased that they saw the conference as valuable. We took a sample of whether or not people thought we should do this again," said Michael Powers, ERDC technical director for geospatial research and engineering. "The answer was resoundingly yes."
The coalition established a portal where attendees can comment on the conference. In addition to annual conferences, organizers plan to hold a smaller working group in the months ahead for those interested in BML and geospatial BML.
The challenge of BML is at multiple levels, participants say. The specific issue as identified by the group starting out was that the standard way of generating an order in the Army is a five-paragraph wording consisting primarily of text. In order for this text to be interpreted, a large expenditure of resources can be necessary.
"That has been an overriding problem for us as we attempt to develop advanced decision aids and simulations," said Michael Hieb, research associate professor in the Center of Excellence in C4I at GMU. "There is a broader challenge to construct a formal language of command and control. This is more theoretical, but we see the applicability to being able to develop tools and support operations that cut across military, peacekeeping, disaster relief and non-governmental organization operations. We see geospatial as a key component of this, which is why the conference focused on both battle command and geospatial."
From the geospatial point of view, coalition members see an overriding need to bring mission information to military geospatial processing.
"We see a problem in that much of the geospatial work is done separated from the battle command process. Part of the solution is both developing a formal command and control language and specifically developing engineered knowledge that contributes to a BML in various domains," Hieb said. "That is the key infrastructure solution."
Capability Focus
Net-centric warfare is demanding new approaches to interoperability. In the past, interoperability initiatives tended to focus on the connectivity of like systems, said David Swann, director of defense business development at ESRI.
If you want to connect command and control systems to command and control systems, there is a range of standards called the Multilateral Interoperability Program (MIP), Swann explained. So if you want coalition partners to exchange command and control information, you use MIP. If you want to connect simulation systems together, there is a set of standards called high level architecture distributed interactive simulation (HLA DIS). And if you want to connect GIS systems together, the Open Geospatial Consortium has a set of geospatial interoperability standards.
"But if we want to connect command and control, GIS and simulation systems together, there is a challenge," Swann said. "And yet we want to do that for a number of reasons. We want to train as we fight, so we want to rehearse our command and control systems within a simulation environment. We want to embed war gaming-a type of simulation-into our command and control systems so we can look at how future options might play out.
"In both of those cases, we need those to be conducted against real terrain. That's where geographic information systems bring the real world into those information systems," he continued.
BML is trying to establish common understanding between command and control, simulation systems, and GeoBML is aiming to connect high end GIS systems into command and control and simulation systems.
"There are a lot of interoperability initiatives that are empty-they just do interoperability for the sake of interoperability. One of the things that the industry partners in this are most anxious to do is focus in on the capability," Swann said. "This is interoperability for capability's sake. There is a huge difference. Our involvement is absolutely about delivering enhanced capability to the warfighter."
Open interoperability standards for the C4I market will enable the same transformation that the modeling and simulation (M&S) market has enjoyed over the past 15 years, observed Warren Katz, chief executive officer of MÄK Technologies.
During that time, the M&S market has been transformed from a custom-built, one-of-a-kind industry to a business that builds systems based on interoperable COTS products, with the necessary customization on top. "The key enablers of this market transformation were open interoperability standards that allow customers to easily integrate compliant products from different vendors and easily upgrade to newer products when available," said Katz. "The time and money spent developing simulation systems have plummeted, and the end-user has many competing choices in the marketplace from which to compose the initial system and later retrofit."
The C4I market today is beginning the same transformation that the M&S market started 15 years ago, Katz suggested, with many systems still being built with customized, proprietary data interfaces that prevent the end user from substituting COTS modules for custom developed subsystems. "This type of stovepipe system is extremely expensive and time consuming to develop and maintain, and locks the end user into going back to the original developer for all upgrades," he said.
C4I-related standards such as BML and OpenGIS, in conjunction with M&S standards DIS, HLA, OpenFlight and SEDRIS, will permit the rapid construction of seamlessly integrated C4I/M&S systems built from existing COTS products. The cost and time to develop C4I systems will likewise plummet, just as in the M&S market, while providing end users more robust, capable, modular and upgradeable systems.
Katz outlined three goals. The first is open interoperability standards that adhere to the legal definition of a "voluntary consensus standard," as described by the Office of Management and Budget. The second is strict acquisition policies that require the use of these standards, adopted and enforced by organizations such as the Department of Defense and NATO. Finally, he urged, an initial set of COTS vendors should be offered incentives to make their products compliant with these new standards.
Standardization Process
In talking about a formal language, Hieb makes clear that it's not going to be something the warfighter would immediately see, but rather more of an infrastructure and enabling technology.
"We don't have SQL interfaces for people these days, and yet every significant system we have relies upon database technology," Hieb said. "We see BML as being a fundamental technology similar to that. That would allow us to develop advanced decision support tools that we need and also for the geospatial world as well."
Coalition members emphasize the importance of having broad community support and broad industry participation as they develop technology and standards. Although the military can develop and mandate a standard, Hieb said, "This has in large part failed in recent years because these standards don't have a strong business model. We believe it is essential to have industry involved early on and to develop a viable and working business model as we develop this technology."
The coalition is currently involved in standing up a development and standardization process. "We're looking at a two- to three-year process until we get the first standards through," Hieb said. "However, the technology itself is starting to be implemented at various systems-the initial BML language for Army operations and the geospatial extensions that we're developing."
These are being developed with the goal of being put into systems in the next two to three years.
The group discussed several standardization process models, including the distributed interactive simulation (DIS) approach for standards creation. Another model is called the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM).
"Whether or not we take the DIS model or SCORM model, both of which were successful, it depends on the level of buy-in that we get out of the private sector initially," said Powers. "We have to have that participation fairly broadly. The DIS model went along that line much more than the SCORM."
SCORM is a standard used to define and access information about learning objects so they can be easily shared among different learning management systems. SCORM was developed in response to a Department of Defense initiative to promote standardization in e-learning.
"SCORM was a model for distributed educational software, and it went very quickly and very positively to a standard that's been totally adopted for distributed education," Powers said. "But it was a very small effort and a very tight group."
There is a BML standardization group within an IEEE-accredited organization, the Simulation Interoperability Standards organization (SISO), which has a product development group that will result in an international standard. The second significant organization is NATO. The coalition has a NATO technical working group, MSG 048, that is working on Coalition BML. "We have 10 nations participating," Hieb said. "We are particularly proud of that, since it that shows a high interest not only with industry but also among different countries."
"The question that we raised is, since SISO represents the simulation community, is that open enough for the community that we'd like to address with this standard?" said Powers.
"As we go to more distributed operations, concepts of net-centricity and systems of systems, a challenge becomes how do I represent information such that it has a consistent meaning to the human operator and a consistent meaning and representation to automated systems so they can be used in a coherent manner to achieve effective decision-making and execution," Powers continued.
The concept of BML arose in the late 1990s out of the simulation community, which needed greater exactness of representation and meaning for simulations. "The second benefit you should see out of BML is the ability to link together command and control as well as simulation systems using what we hope will be a common semantic representation of needed information," Powers said.
If best-of-breed COTS products are used as the basis for new C4I systems, the improvement in capability and increase in quality of those systems will accelerate at an unprecedented rate, said Katz, and time to deliver to the warfighter will shrink dramatically. Head-to-head competition in the COTS market will drive prices down considerably. In addition, the confluence of C4I and M&S will give commanders new features such as course of action analysis, mission rehearsal, and training, all embedded in the operational command and control system.
"The engineering part of the aforementioned triad seems well in-hand, with several highly reputed academic participants, and motivated industry and government participants contributing to the development of the standards," said Katz. ♦
