ABSTRACT

Military is one of many industries that is more computer-dependent than ever before, from soldiers with computerized weapons, and tactical wireless devices, to commanders with advanced battle management, command and control systems. Fundamentally, command and control is the process of planning, monitoring, and commanding military personnel, weaponry equipment, and combating vehicles to execute military missions. In fact, command and control systems are revolutionizing as war fighting is changing into cyber, technology, information, and unmanned warfare. As a result, a new design model that supports scalability, reusability, maintainability, survivability, and interoperability is needed to allow commanders, hundreds of miles away from the battlefield, to plan, monitor, evaluate, and control the war events in a dynamic, robust, agile, and reliable manner. This paper proposes a service-oriented architecture for weaponry and battle command and control systems, made out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to any computing military equipment; the server tier that corresponds to the web services that deliver the basic functionalities for the client tier; and the middleware tier that corresponds to an enterprise service bus that promotes interoperability between all the interconnected entities. A command and control system was simulated and experimented and it successfully exhibited the desired features of SOA. Future research can improve upon the proposed architecture so much so that it supports encryption for securing the exchange of data between the various communicating entities of the system.

The Army is one of many industries that rely more on computers than ever, from soldiers with computerised weapons and tactical wireless devices to commanders with advanced battle management, control, and control systems. Fundamentally, command and control is the process of planning, monitoring and controlling military personnel, armament equipment and combat vehicles to execute military missions. In fact, command and control systems are revolutionising the war fight is changing in cyber, technology, information and unmanned warfare. As a result, a new design model is needed that supports scalability, reuse, maintainability, survivability and interoperability to enable commanders, hundreds of thousands of people off the battlefield, to plan, Monitor, evaluate and control war events in a dynamic environment, robust, agile and reliable. 

This article proposes a service oriented architecture for armament and battle command and control systems, made of loose distributed web services. The proposed architecture consists of three basic levels: the customer level that corresponds to any military computer equipment; The server level that corresponds to the web services that provide the basic functionalities for the client level; And the level of middle-ware that corresponds to an enterprise service bus that promotes interoperability among all interconnected entities. A command and control system was simulated and experienced and successfully exhibited the desired SOA characteristics. Future research can improve both the proposed architecture that supports encryption to ensure the exchange of data between the various communicating entities of the system.