James R. Milligan

Fuselets: lightweight applications for information manipulation

Information management draws upon many disciplines including the collection of information needs, acquisition of information, information assessment, dissemination of information, and control of a managed information space. This paper introduces the general notions of information management in the large and the facet of information management known as manipulation, and provides an in-depth discussion of an advanced technology prototype implementation for the management of lightweight applications known as “fuselets” that perform value-added information processing functions over the managed information space. A fuselet is a light-weight, special-purpose Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) client that provides value-added functions for information processing that are under the control of the JBI platform services. The information processing functions take existing information objects within the JBI information space as input and manipulate them in a specified manner to produce new information objects. Information manipulations performed by fuselets typically satisfy the recurring information needs that are found to be common across multiple Communities of Interest (COIs), but are also often customized or developed from scratch to satisfy the immediate needs of a specific COI or information consumer for which there is no other readily available solution. This paper will discuss the overall fuselet system architecture and a developmental prototype that establishes an operational framework for fuselet execution and management.

Xaxis: A framework for web-based collaborative applications

The purpose of this paper is to present a deployment framework for web-based collaborative applications. Collaboration, current web-enabling technologies, and the recent application of those technologies will be discussed to emphasize the importance of the envisioned Xaxis framework. A partial implementation of the Xaxis framework has proven to be an ideal deployment technology for collaborative web applications in an Air Force experiment dealing with dynamic mission replanning. We identify future work necessary to bring the Xaxis framework to maturity.

A hybrid P2P and pub/sub messaging system for decentralized Information Management

A key property in tactical network environments is that the wireless network itself is typically the major limiting factor in how much information can be shared between users. In such environments, tactical operations often employ group communication protocols (one-to-many or many-to-many) to send information between users. This often results in situations where every message sent gets delivered to everyone on the network which can lead to network congestion, performance degradation, application failure, and even complete information loss. In light of todays computationally rich mobile devices, it is preferential to expend additional processing power to limit the messages being sent to only those required by interested clients rather than to simply deliver every message to every client. This paper summarizes the results of a research effort to explore and implement an Information Management (IM) prototype known as BANDIT that enables efficient and reliable information exchange across a swarm of Android devices within a decentralized Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. BANDIT features a lightweight implementation of the Kademlia algorithm for P2P swarm management, and implements an efficient broadcast algorithm designed for minimal cost internode communication within structured P2P networks. BANDIT provides decentralized publish/subscribe IM services that, in contrast to more traditional IM systems, have no reliance on a centralized server (which requires additional dedicated hardware and poses the risk of being a single point of failure). Instead, BANDIT IM services are provided by each of the devices participating in the swarm. BANDIT is interoperable with traditional client-server based IM systems which further enables information sharing across tactical and strategic elements.

Semantic mediation and transformation services: perspectives on military application areas

Semantic technology is becoming an increasingly viable solution to interoperability problems that arise as user communities seek to interact within and across information spaces such as those that ride on the Global Information Grid (GIG).1 Semantically-aware cross-domain information transformation and service mediation capabilities can be used to improve interactions between diverse Communities of Interest (COIs) and the software applications that service them.2 This paper is not so much about the details of the technology itself, but is intended rather to focus on the operational domains in which interoperability problems and needs exist for the warfighter that are likely to benefit from the application of semantic technologies. It attempts to unveil military application areas against which technological solutions could be developed by academia, industry, and other technology experts to forge a path toward semantic interoperability and, ultimately, information superiority.3 It then provides an overview of on-going and possible future areas of semantic technology research and development being pursued by the Air Force Research Laboratorys Information Directorate (AFRL/IF) located in Rome, NY.

Net-centric information management challenges

The Department of Defense is making significant investments to construct systems, built upon web services and their supporting technologies, that strive to achieve the goals of net-centricity. While these technologies address several of the traditional stumbling blocks to integration and interoperability, they leave issues of information management largely unaddressed. Indeed, the broad availability of these systems exacerbates, rather than reduces, stresses on our information management capabilities. This paper discusses the enterprise-level information management infrastructure objectives for providing net-centric military capabilities and more fundamental technical challenges derived from them.

Enabling real-time global reach using a gateway building framework

The enterprise and tactical domains have distinct properties and requirements, and have thus evolved independently in incompatible ways. Today the network infrastructure has emerged to, in theory, enable interconnectivity between these domains at a global scale. Unfortunately, even in the presence of these communication capabilities and despite the benefits that each operational domain can gain from access to information held by the other, warfighters at the tactical edge and analysts in enterprise agencies continue to lack meaningful, realtime access to each others information. The separate evolution of the two domains has led to clients that use different forms of identification and access control, systems that employ different applications and use different data formats, and networks that operate most efficiently under different protocols. To address these differences and the need to meaningfully bridge enterprise and tactical domains, we are developing a framework for Robust Operational Gateways Enabling Reachback/Reach-forward (ROGER). ROGER attempts to address the hard problems inherent in connecting disparate clients, services, and networks over potentially unreliable communication substrates, in a manner that not only enables connectivity where none was present before, but in a way that enables efficient, effective, safe, and reliable information discovery and sharing. Acknowledging the plurality of types and structures of networks, services, applications, and missions, ROGER provides a gateway framework rather than a specific gateway. This framework supports building gateways that enable safe reach-back and reach-forward across a large set of heterogeneous networks and systems. By enabling the selection and configuration of pluggable, context specific components, ROGER supports the instantiation of gateways customized for particular deployments. Multiple gateways can be chained to provide reach-back and reach-forward across widely different and geographically dispersed networks.

Routing and scheduling of spatio-temporal tasks for optimizing airborne sensor system utilization

Airborne image sensing systems are equipped on piloted or remotely-piloted aerial vehicles to collect imagery data. Often the equipped image sensors are mostly underutilized. The objective is to increase the sensor system utilization by enabling dynamic multitasking so that ground operators can access and transmit sensor task requests to an aerial vehicle. However, this may deviate the original route of an aerial vehicle. In this paper, we will be investigating this new problem of generating a new route to follow, as long as the assigned target points and original waypoints are not affected. Our goal is to find an optimal route on the fly between the given original waypoints such that it satisfies the maximum number of sensor task requests from ground users, of minimum sum of deviations subject to maximum deviation from the original route, without violating the original mission and flight maneuvering constraints. With the given constraints, finding an optimal route is an NP-hard problem. Therefore, we proposed two heuristic-based methods: namely, the FPCA approach that utilizes the idea of footprint diameter, and the SWCA approach that tackles this problem via the use of task clustering. The performance of these algorithms are compared through experiments using data from real flight trajectories. Our results show that SWCA outperforms FPCA in most settings.

A template based approach to specifying the information needs of military missions

Situational awareness supports mission assurance and requires access to archived and real-time information that is most relevant to the mission being performed, the roles of warfighters, and evolving operational scenarios. Information Management (IM) services support the discovery, brokering, and dissemination of past and future information in support of military missions. They decouple information providers from information consumers as they discover and disseminate information based on information attributes and consumer interests, no matter where, when, or how that information has become available. However, setting up the requests (i.e., subscriptions and queries) to provide situation awareness can be a complex task that requires significant time, expertise, and patience. This paper describes Adaptive Mission Templates (AMT), a prototype graphical environment for defining the information needs of operational missions; generating requests for information, including requests based on dynamic mission context; and specifying the prioritization of information based on mission needs and context. The AMT software has been demonstrated on US Air Force mission scenarios to generate requests and policies enforced by an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) information broker.

Supporting information management and information superiority via federation services

Network-centric warfare is often credited for the superior warfighting capabilities of the United States. One of the fundamental requirements for network-centric warfare is the timely exchange of information critical to mission success. The Phoenix Information Management Services (IMS) have been developed to address this all-important requirement. This paper describes a set of federation services that extend the Phoenix IMS to span multiple enclaves or domains of information management. Federation services interconnect multiple instances of Phoenix and support controlled information exchange across enclaves. Federation services, coupled with the core Phoenix information management services, are a force multiplier, allowing information to be shared across not just one, but any number of domains and information spaces. This in turn promotes shared situational awareness, unity of command, and synchronized operations across a variety of missions.