Ed Morris

Engineering Systems of Systems

Over the past decade, the focus of much effort in systems development has evolved from the development of individual self- contained systems to the integration of large-scale systems of systems (SoS) that are constantly evolving to address new user needs. Because these types of systems of systems no longer have a single controlling authority, have components that are developed and evolve independently, and as a result cannot be specified by a top-down set of requirements, the methods for engineering them need to be modified from the methods for engineering traditional systems. This paper identifies the characteristics of SoS, proposes a SoS life cycle, and identifies some considerations for requirements engineering in an SoS environment.

Identity management and its impact on federation in a system-of-systems context

In its simplest form, identity management deals with how users are identified and authorized across networks. In the case of federated identity management, these networks cross system and organizational boundaries. To manage identity in this context, a cooperative contract is set up between multiple identity providers, using a decentralized approach. Establishing an identity management strategy within a single entity is straightforward. However, implementing identity management in a system of systems context presents unique challenges. This paper explains identity management in a federated context, presents the challenges of federated identity management, and provides some guidelines for successful federated identity management.

Information assurance challenges and strategies for securing SOA environments and web services

The potential benefits of business agility, flexibility, and reuse associated with SOA are well known today. However, these benefits do not come without a cost of their own, particularly regarding security. The primary goal to make web services widely accessible can also make them vulnerable. This paper examines the key challenges for securing service-oriented environments and identifies the important information assurance strategies that are necessary to mitigate and manage the security risks in an SOA environment.

Web services for handheld tactical systems

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural pattern for constructing and deploying systems characterized by components called services that can be composed into applications using standard interface formats. While service orientation can reduce integration cost and enhance agility in response to changing situations, it has not been widely applied to support mobile users in ad hoc, wireless computing environments common to tactical military situations and first responders to humanitarian disasters. These environments are impoverished in terms of computational resources and network characteristics. This paper describes a set of prototypes that demonstrate the use of SOA in tactical environments in which users are employing handheld devices to obtain situational awareness data.

COTS-Based Development: Taking the Pulse of a Project

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based systems demand new indicators for determining a projects progress and its potential for success. Research by the COTS-based system (CBS) Initiative at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has shown that organizations building, acquiring, or supporting systems that rely on COTS products experience a consistent set, or pattern, of problems. These patterns provide the foundation for SEI seminars and workshops that present high-level keys to success along with activities or artifacts to look for in successful COTS-based system projects. These same patterns underlie the SEI COTS usage risk evaluation (CURE) technique for conducting a detailed risk analysis of the use of COTS products within an ongoing project. This paper reports on work that expands these efforts to provide an easily used mechanism to help organizations avoid inadequate practices and employ improved ones--in effect, to allow program managers to take the pulse of their COTS-based projects.

eMontage: An architecture for rapid integration of situational awareness data at the edge

This paper presents an architecture for rapid integration of situational awareness data on mobile handheld devices in resource-constrained, hostile environments. This capability will give users in crisis environments access to relevant data presented on a single screen with a consistent user interface. The framework and architecture discussed here enable the rapid addition of both publicly available and domain-specific data sources. This solution enables users to construct geospatial data mashups. Our architecture for accessing and filtering data from multiple sources provides benefits such as combining data from real-time and historical sources, operating in connected or disconnected modes, supporting individual selection and filtering of data, and integrating data from multiple sources.

Applying video summarization to aerial surveillance

The US increasingly relies on surveillance video to determine when activities of interest occur in a surveilled location. The growth in video volume places a difficult burden on the analyst workforce charged with evaluating streaming video or performing forensic analysis on archived video. This paper presents a video summarization pipeline that attempts to reduce the volume of video analysts must watch by summarizing the video into shorter, presumably important clips. The pipeline incorporates object recognition and tracking to generate clips composed of bounding boxes for objects across time, segments these clips into unique trajectories, trains a stacked sparse autoencoder, then generates a summary based on reconstruction error within the autoencoder, where high error indicates a unique (relative to previous) object trajectory. The paper then compares performance of the summarization pipeline applied to research datasets to performance on more realistic DoD surveillance datasets.