Robert G. Hillman

Adversarial inferencing for generating dynamic adversary behavior

In the current world environment, the rapidly changing dynamics of organizational adversaries are increasing the difficulty for Military Analysts and Planners to accurately predict potential actions. As an integral part of the planning process, we need to assess our planning strategies against the range of potential adversarial actions. This dynamic world environment has established a necessity to develop tools to assist in establishing hypotheses for future adversary actions. Our research investigated the feasibility to utilize an adversarial tool as the core element within a predictive simulation to establish emergent adversarial behavior. It is our desire to use this intelligent adversary to generate alternative futures in performing Course of Action (COA) analysis. Such a system will allow planners to gauge and evaluate the effectiveness of alternative plans under varying actions and reactions. This research focuses on one of many possible techniques required to address the technical challenge of generating intelligent adversary behaviors. This development activity addresses two research components. First, establish an environment in which to perform the feasibility experiment and analysis. The proof of concept performed to analyze and assess this feasibility of utilizing an adversarial inferencing system to provide emergent adversary behavior is discussed. Second, determine if the appropriate interfaces can be reasonably established to provide integration with an existing force structure simulation framework. The authors also describe the envisioned simulation system and the software development performed to extend the inferencing engine and system interface toward that goal. The experimental results of observing emergent adversary behavior by applying the simulated COAs to the adversary model will be discussed. The research addresses numerous technological challenges in developing the necessary methodologies and tools for a software-based COA analysis framework utilizing intelligent adversarial intent.

Building net-centric military applications over service oriented architectures

We compare the overall structure of military GIG and NCES architectures with that of the object oriented architectures (CORBA, J2EE and .NET) and of the emerging Web Services architecture. While the match is good in many ways, particularly with respect to Web Services, we also identify a series of shortcomings that could stymie attempts to implement a GIG or NCES system directly on a commercial Web Services platform. Our comparison leads to suggestions for experimental investigations of some topics, but also for more fundamental inquiry in some areas where the scientific base is inadequate. Several issues of the latter sort arise when we consider the mixture of scalability, security, robustness, and time-criticality that must be simultaneously satisfied in demanding military applications.

A dynamic and policy-controlled approach to federating information systems

Timely access to relevant data and information is critical to successful mission execution in network centric warfare. Often, the data required to support a mission is not always resident within a single system, but is distributed among multiple systems that must be dynamically interconnected to support the data and information needs. While proprietary and stove-piped information systems have slowly given way to standardized information management architectures (such as the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) architecture developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory), each independent organization and/or mission is normally associated with a separate instance of a managed information space that operates in an independent manner. This is necessary given the different stakeholders and administrative domains responsible for the information. However, the demands for coordination and cooperation require interoperability and information exchange between these independently operating information spaces. This paper describes a federated approach to interconnecting multiple information spaces to enable data interchange. We propose a set of interfaces to facilitate dynamic, runtime discovery and federation of information spaces. We also integrate with the KAoS policy and domain services framework to realize policy-based control over the federation and exchange of information. Our approach allows clients to transparently perform publish, subscribe, and query operations across all the federated information spaces. We have integrated with three existing JBI implementations – Apollo from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Mercury from General Dynamics and AIMS from Northrop Grumman. Most recently, we have integrated with Phoenix, a fully SoA (Service-oriented Architecture) based approach to information management.

AIMS taking on roles to support tactical information dominance

Military solutions to enable information sharing are being developed that will fundamentally change future concepts of operation. The development of sophisticated approaches to managing this information is a key element to reliably disseminate valued information to the tactical edge. This paper will describe the merging of two such systems to support these tactical edge users; the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Joint Battlespace Infosphere Reference Implementation (JBI/RI) and the Northrop Grumman Advanced Information Architecture (AIATM). The newly formed system is called the Advanced Information Management System (AIMS). The resulting technology, rooted in a service oriented approach, provides a managed information dissemination approach through the use of publish, subscribe, and query services. Information can be collected and shared among Communities of Interest (COI) without specific involvement from the tactical users. Persistence (via archiving to repositories), is a new capability added to the existing AIATM. Extreme care is taken to effectively manage the information within this dynamic environment. For example, Information resulting from queries and subscriptions is cached to mitigate potential bandwidth challenges at critical location within the system. AIMS improves security by allowing the establishment of roles for retrieval/publishing of information. The access to information is controlled not only at the message level but also by specified elements within the metadata tags. Lastly, the fortification of AIMS with Web Services allows for a highly cohesive loosely coupled design. AIMS utilizes of a Universal Description, Definition, and Integration (UDDI)[2] registry to describe and register services within the architecture. The UDDI allows implementations outside of AIMS (3rd party) to invoke any of the registered services for use within their own applications.

An approach to effects-based modeling for wargaming

Effects-based operations (EBO) are proving to be a vital part of current concepts of operations in military missions and consequently need to be an integral part of current generation wargames. EBO focuses on the producing effects from military activities, as opposed to the direct result of attacking targets. Alternatively, the emphasis of conventional wargames is focused on attrition-based modeling and is incapable of assessing effects and their contribution to the overall mission objectives. For wargames to be effective, they must allow users to evaluate multiple ways to accomplish the same goal with a combination of direct, indirect and cascading events (actions). The focus of this paper is to describe the development of a methodology for the implementation of EBO concepts into modern wargames. The design approach was to develop a generic methodology and demonstrate how simulation objects can incorporate EBO capabilities. The authors will illustrate the application of the methodology utilizing an EBO scenario example, which was developed to test the system.

Exploiting HHPC for parallel discrete event simulation

Parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) is an important application in use in many DoD projects; for example, PDES is used in large-scale war-gaming, and in complex system design, analysis and verification. Improving PDES performance and capacity allows faster simulation times and more extensive analysis of more detailed models. These benefits are not application-specific: they should reflect to any application that uses the improved simulation kernel. In this work, we overview our efforts for optimizing PDES in a heterogeneous high performance computing (HHPC) environment. We profile the SPEEDES simulator and identify several opportunities. We report on our experiences on two fronts: (1) optimizing the communication subsystem - a critical system for PDES since it is a fine-grained application and (2) exploring the use of augmented FPGA boards to accelerate simulation. While such approaches have been attempted for sequential and data path intensive applications, we believe that their use in clustered environments is novel. Both efforts are works in progress; we present our designs and some preliminary analysis results. For example, removing the centralized communication server from event message exchange path with a number of other small improvements to the simulation cycle, improved performance by an average of 20% performance improvement for one of our large benchmarks.

Advanced Protected Services - A Concept Paper on Survivable Service-Oriented Systems

As newer software construction paradigms like service-oriented architecture (SOA) are adopted into systems of critical importance, it becomes imperative that technology and design artifacts exist that can be utilized to raise the resiliency and protection of such systems to a level where they can withstand sustained attacks from well-motivated adversaries. In this paper we describe a sampling of innovative services and mechanisms that are designed for the protection of systems that are based on service-oriented architectures.

HPC performance analysis of a distributed information enterprise simulation

Simulations of distributed information enterprises using the DIEMS framework were performed on HPC clusters and SMP machines. The simulation results were analyzed with respect to the computation time involved in each process, the number of times processes were executed, the number of simulation rollbacks invoked during each simulation, simulation overhead, and the total wall clock time used to perform the simulation. The analysis identified several performance limitations and bottlenecks. One critical limitation addressed and eliminated was simultaneously mixing a periodic process model with an event driven model causing rollbacks. The second major factor limiting performance on cluster based systems was the cross-node communication. An optimization technique that exploits the knowledge of the publication and subscription paradigm of the information architecture being simulated was developed. This paper describes the simulation analysis, the modifications to the simulation models, the development of an optimization technique, and the impact of the code improvements on simulation performance.

Analysis of a JBI pub/sub architecture's infrastructure requirements

A Distributed Information Enterprise Modeling and Simulation (DIEMS) framework, presently under development, is applied to the analysis of a Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) Pub/Sub architectures infrastructural requirements. This analysis is an example of one methodology that can be employed utilizing the DIEMS framework. This analysis capability permits the information systems engineer to ensure that the planned JBI architecture deployment will provide the required information exchange performance on the infrastructure provided. This paper describes the DIEMS framework including its application in constrained and unconstrained resource utilization modes. A JBI architecture is evaluated in the context of a representative operational scenario on one infrastructure. The simulators unconstrained resource mode is employed to identify the architectures ideal operational requirements and in turn identify potential resource limitations. The constrained simulation mode is employed to evaluate the potential choke points in relation to the architectures performance. The results identify the infrastructure changes required so that the specific JBI architecture will achieve the required operational performance.

Complete WAVES/VHDL Integration

In this chapter, which concludes our basic tutorial sequence, we describe how to put everything together, to simulate the WAVES and VHDL combination and obtain the results we need to support our design and testing endeavors. We begin with a conceptual view of the functionality of the integrated WAVES-VHDL simulation system. Here, we explain how all the elements in a WAVES-VHDL testbench interface during simulation. Next, we present a group of interface functions necessary to implement the conceptual model of the testbench in the WAVES-VHDL simulation environment. The purpose and role of each function, including actual VHDL codes, are presented here, and all functions are collected in the Waves_1164_Utilities package. Then, we describe an implementation of a WAVESVHDL simulation system, which utilizes the libraries WAVES_STD and WAVES_1164, with an example. Here, we demonstrate that the WAVES files necessary to test and simulate a design can be generated with minimal effort. Finally, we conclude this chapter with an additional example to further assist us in developing the WAVES dataset.