Modelling and simulation of Network Enabled Capability on service-oriented architecture

Abstract

Network Enabled Capability (NEC) is the U.K. Ministry of Defence's response to the quickly changing conflict environment in which its forces must operate. In NEC, systems need to be integrated in context, to assist in human activity and provide dependable inter-operation. In this paper, we present our research work in the NECTISE project with a focus on the modelling and simulation of service-oriented architecture (SOA) for delivering dependable and sustainable military capability. The simulation results indicate that the proposed architectural model can provide a high-level of reliability and sustainability in the provision of capability in a dynamic environment.Moreover, a NEC demonstration system for regional surveillance is introduced in this paper to illustrate the use of SOA to achieve NEC. The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses part of an investigation into SOA for the support of dynamic military environments and delivery of NEC. The architectural solutions for dependable and sustainable provision of capability are presented in Section 3. In Section 4, the reliability of provision of capability is evaluated by modelling and simulations of SOA in a dynamic environment. KeywordsThe NEC demonstration system for regional surveillance is introduced in Section 5 to illustrate the use of SOA for NEC. In Section 6, conclusions are drawn and future work is described. Service-Oriented ArchitectureThe use of SOA has been motivated by many industries changing focus from product delivery to service-based delivery. The focus on service delivery has also been apparent in software, where networking has become faster, more reliable and more available through reduced cost. The approach to SOA in software enables business process integration that characterises business functions as services, and integrates dynamically across departments and organisations.The conceptual SOA can be used to integrate businesses, systems and computing at Services in NECThe NEC initiative recognises that providing integrated functionality is the main requirement in supporting military capability, and that functionality can be delivered without ownership of the delivery mechanism.In principle, suppliers can respond to customers' needs, providing the delivery of appropriate and up-to-date solutions into the military. Architectural characteristics required by NEC, such as flexible interoperability and future-proof evolvability, can be in part provided by SOA, where organisations, systems and computing each have defined service interfaces. Figure 1: Capability concept modelIn this paper, the definition of the term 'service' is not limited to Web Services and is not restricted to specific technologies. Services include other system resources, people and processes. A formal service description is used to define a service and a 5 service interface is used to access it. This level of abstraction allows the composition of services, similar to the integration of responsibilities in Figure 1. The capability concept mo...

An analysis of capability meta-models for expressing dynamic business transformation

“…Therefore, a capability that changes is most likely to affect its delivery as well. Examples of the most common concepts that exist in meta-models and reflect capability realization are the concepts of process, as in [77], business process [55], service [67,68], business service [25], behavior element [47], capability realization [93], task [89], action [62] and activity [27]. There have also been associations depicting delivery for example "delivers" [80] and "realizes" [84].…”