Strengthening OV-6a Semantics with Rule-Based Meta-models in DEVS/DoDAF based Life-cycle Architectures Development

The development of a distributed testing environment would have to comply with recent Department of Defense (DoD) mandates requiring that the DoD architectural framework (DoDAF) be adopted to express high level system and operational requirements and architectures. Unfortunately, DoDAF and DoD net-centric mandates pose significant challenges to testing and evaluation since DoDAF specifications must be evaluated to see if they meet requirements and objectives, yet they are not expressed in a form that is amenable to such evaluation. DoDAF is the basis for integrated architectures and provides broad levels of specification related to operational, system, and technical views. In our earlier work, we described an approach to support specification of DoDAF architectures within a development environment based on DEVS (discrete event system specification) for semi-automated construction of the needed simulation models. The result is an enhanced system lifecycle development process that includes both development and testing in an integral manner. We also developed automated model generation using XML which paves the way for OVs to become service-providing components in the Web services architecture. In this paper we present the semantic structure for one of the operational view documents OV-6a that would aid the development of these semi-automated models. We will describe how 0V-6a can be structured in a more generalized meta-model framework such that every rule is reducible to meaningful code which is automatedly constructed through natural language processing (NLP) methods and further be reduced to DEVS based models. The paper also presents an overview of the life-cycle development methodology for these enterprise architectures and how a common enterprise domain-model can be used in customized business/domain-specific rules and policy structures