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home > November/December, 2007 issue > article
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| Virginia Lee Hunter/WPN |
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| Eric Martens, of Boeing, said a demonstration conducted early last year “showed the relative maturity of the JBI as an information management infrastructure.” |
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Peer into the infosphere
By Brian Robinson
Special to Defense Systems
Air Force researchers develop a new approach to making information available in the joint battlespace
The goal of network-centric warfare is to provide battlefield forces with timely access to the information they need to succeed in their missions and enable them to easily share information in a joint-forces environment. All of that is much easier said than done.
Although military commanders have access to more information than before, getting that information in its most usable form to where it can be highly effective is difficult. Over the years, the services have designed information systems to deliver specific kinds of information for specific tasks, resulting in a motley collection of systems that can’t easily talk to one another.
The concept of a Joint Battlespace Infosphere was first broached nearly a decade ago as a way to provide net-centric information sharing. The idea was to create a secure global information application where people could publish and extract information without having to consider where that information originates.
The concept caught on quickly and was adopted by the Air Force Research Laboratory as one of its primary information management development projects.
As early as 2003, Donald Daniel, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force and former executive director of AFRL, called JBI one of the five major future transformational capabilities. The others were unmanned combat aerial vehicles, small munitions, directed-energy weapons and microsatellites.
However, unlike those other capabilities, there will never be a product named JBI. Instead, JBI will take shape as a system of systems intended to deal with the challenges of managing combat information.
Reworking info channels
JBI will change the way warfighters operate on the battlefield because of the quality of information they receive as compared with more traditional channels, said Mark Linderman, JBI program manager at AFRL’s Information Directorate.
Warfighters often ask for information in terms of the different collection platforms available rather than in terms of their actual needs, Linderman said. “In a nutshell, this is the principal challenge of moving from a platform-centric environment to a network-centric environment.” It could be that there is another sensor in the network, such as a forward-deployed F-22 fighter, that has a significantly better source of information than the traditional platform because of its proximity to the action, he said.
“In a net-centric environment that information would be made available to the warfighter, while in a platform-centric environment, the warfighter either wouldn’t think to ask or perhaps wouldn’t even know who to ask,” Linderman said.
In conventional communications, links must be established and maintained among various systems for information to be shared. With JBI, people producing or accessing information do not interact with one another, but with a common information space. JBI producers will publish data there, with consumers accessing it either through subscription or by queries.
The data in that space is stored and shared as managed information objects (MIOs) that have three parts: a type and version, metadata, and a payload.
The metadata is the key to how these objects are handled because consumers subscribe for information based on its metadata, and they use various predicates to separate relevant information from what they don’t need, Linderman said.
“While the JBI doesn’t presume to understand the payload of the MIO, it must be able to interpret the metadata to determine if a given MIO satisfies a consumer predicate. Metadata may also be used to determine the relative priority of that information.” The type is also important because it can be used as a primary filter for information and because it’s assumed that all MIOs of a given type have the same metadata schema.
Therefore, although those communities of interest that use JBI technology may still rely on nonstandard payloads, the structure of the MIO ensures the minimal level of commonality needed for consistent management of information within the information space, Linderman said.
Early tests
Although JBI is still an in-house research and development program at AFRL, its concepts and technologies have been finding their way to the outside world, though still mostly in the form of test projects.
For example, Boeing Phantom Works has been under contract to the AFRL since 2004 to develop information-management services to provide net-centric, machine-to-machine interoperability between tactical fighters and command-and-control elements as part of the JBI program.
One objective of the program is to develop ways for Global Information Grid information management services to work in an operational context.
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| Mark Linderman, of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate, says DOD needs to shift from a platform-centric environment to a network-centric one. |
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Early last year, Boeing and AFRL researchers successfully demonstrated that through tests involving the F-15E Advanced Technology Demonstrator modified with intelligent software agents.
During scenarios similar to those flown during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the software agents sorted and filtered information while the aircraft’s crew sent and received only the most tactically relevant information along the GIG.
The agents also transformed data on things such as target status, fuel status and weapon stores into information that air operations
commanders could access on the GIG to direct the aircraft to various targets.
This was the first time an in-flight aircraft had been linked to the GIG in that way.
“It showed the relative maturity of the JBI as an information management infrastructure,” said Eric Martens, Boeing Phantom’s principal investigator for the program. “We were able to simply plug the F-15E into the JBI, where it acted as just another client” on the network.
More broadly, some JBI technologies are being translated into several software products that can be used by communities of interest for evaluation and testing, and, eventually, for operational use.
The first of those, JBI Mercury, was developed by General Dynamics C4 Systems and delivered in February 2005. That product provides information management capabilities in enterprise infrastructures with large servers and high-bandwidth networks, such as those required by the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES).
By the end of this year, General Dynamics will deliver a tactical version, JBI Gemini. This product extends the basic Mercury specifications to include more performance and security features and more clearly define the relation to NCES and the Net-Centric Enterprise Solutions for Interoperability initiative.
A final product, JBI Apollo, is expected in the next several years.
In the near term, however, the most significant deployment and demonstration of JBI technology is expected to be during the ongoing Joint Expeditionary Forces Experiment 2008 (JEFX-08), where it will be used as the basis of the Air Force Installation Command System.
AFICS, intended for unit-level command and control, allows the entire chain of command to collaborate and share information simultaneously and maintain the situational awareness needed to execute missions quickly, said Pat Vessels, manager of strategic technologies engineering of battle management at General Dynamics C4 Systems.
Not a sure bet
However, there are caveats to the continuing successful development of JBI.
While extolling the possibilities of the JBI in his 2003 paper, for example, Daniel also warned that of all the programs he highlighted as potentially transformative, none faced greater challenges than JBI.
“Even in a static, single-service environment, achieving the objectives of this program would be extremely difficult,” he wrote. “Attempting to build a truly joint framework in the current organizational construct used by the Air Force [or the Army or Navy] is perhaps impossible.” Without significant leadership from the Office of the Secretary of Defense down, and without receiving similar and coordinated support from the Army, Air Force, Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he said, “neither the JBI nor other similar service programs will be realized.” That kind of coordination is still not apparent, said Skip Saunders, an executive director at Mitre and a long-time participant in Air Force and other Defense Department programs. The largest technical barrier to the successful deployment of JBI “is the lack of consensus on what constitutes the integrated framework protocols,” he said.
Even before Daniel expressed his views, Saunders was writing about how JBI could have a significant impact, but first it would require new technologies and tools, new organizational structures, and new relationships between industry and government.
The military and industry would benefit from the larger market and further innovation that would result, he said in a recent interview. However, there are still many competing instantiatons for those integration protocols.
While the Army pursues the Future Combat System, the Air Force uses different protocols for different tasks, the Navy has its own set of preferred standards and the Defense Information Systems Agency pursues the NCES, he said.
There is no basis for comparison or convergence among these protocols, Saunders said, and no venue for experimentation. Instead, organizations debate the various merits by viewgraph or by trying to record requirements documentation.
“So, while I have high hopes for a future,” he said, “unless disciplined engineers become involved in establishing the foundation for the JBI, it will remain a ‘high hope’ without implementation.”
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