Representing operational architectures into a modeling and environment for analyzing communications architectures

As the army transforms towards the future force and an integrated; network centric; command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4LSR)-based systems-of-systems (SoS) concept, the modeling and simulation (M&S) community is struggling to provide the appropriate support across the advanced concepts and requirements (ACR); research, development, and acquisition (RDA); training, exercises, and military operations (TEMO); and testing domains. One of the main issues is the ability to translate the operational context and the C4ISR system design into the simulation environment, in a way that is consistent, flexible, and re-usable. The army currently captures the C4ISR system design and its operational use in what is termed the "DoDAF architecture framework". This consists of a number of operational and system views of the underlying data, each of which describes some aspects of the system and its operational context. Modeling and simulation environments, on the other hand, do not usually have a rigorous framework for representing the design. Translating the architecture views into the M&S environment has been a challenge which, to date, no simulation environment handles adequately. In this paper, we will present an approach that creates a bridge between the C4ISR architecture and the simulation environment by applying the following three-step strategy: 1) adapt the framework products; 2) populate the M&S data in a DoDAF framework-compliant database; and 3) translate architecture views into simulation.