A Service‐based Approach to Force Design, Integration and Analysis

Abstract

Service‐based approaches, as in provider‐consumer relationships, are a relatively new design and engineering philosophy to address problems in business and systems design, development and operations. While the concept has existed for centuries in economics, it has gained prominence more recently with the rise of the service economy and in such areas as systems engineering, information technology and marketing, with IBM only establishing Service science, management and engineering as a field of scientific enquiry within the past decade. The SCMILE Services Framework is a service‐based approach developed to capture and model military capability dependencies. It has a number of attractive properties including simplicity, generality and universality, and is designed to apply at different scales, structured to be modular and supports encapsulation. After the concept and definition of services are introduced, this framework is presented and some of the benefits are explained. This approach is currently being trialed on parts of the Integrated Investment Program of the Australian Department of Defence to capture and monitor capability dependencies and undertake analysis of integration and interoperability within and across Programs.