Service decomposition using the NATO C3 Taxonomy - case studies

NATO introduced the Connected Forces Initiative at the 2012 Chicago summit with the aim to enhance allied interoperability and readiness in order to strengthen the combat power of the alliance. One of the aspects highlighted by this initiative is the importance of providing an ICT infrastructure to make the forces connected, enabling them to communicate and share information. A prevalent method for building such infrastructures in the civilian domain is following the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA). These principles state that complex software functionality should be broken down into a number of smaller, less complex and autonomous software components known as services. One of the goals of doing such service decomposition is that it allows for the re-use of implementations as well as reducing complexity. Both the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and Australia’s Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group are planning experiments in order to provide advice to their respective armed forces regarding these adaptions. A part of the preparations for such experiments is to identify what elements are essential to implement in the ICT infrastructures, and this reports documents a study in which a preliminary list of such elements have been compiled. In order to arrive at this list, the study followed a use case driven approach. The use cases were chosen from four different military communities of interest in order to provide the analysis with sufficient variety without promising to be exhaustive: • Establishing situational awareness and planning a tactical manoeuver in the land domain. • Establishing situational awareness and performing targeting and dynamic re-planning of operational tasks in the air domain. • Request for information (RFI) submission in Joint Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (JISR). • Providing Modelling & Simulation as a service. The analysis identified the following NATO C3 Taxonomy Core Services as candidates for a first inclusion in an ICT infrastructure due to their importance across the use cases: • Infrastructure Storage Services. • Message-Oriented Middleware Services. • Geospatial Services. In addition, there is a need to include security and service management and control services as well as to identify whether the Core Services listed here have important dependencies to other Core Services, in which case should also be considered for inclusion.