Architecture & Systems Integration Applying Service Oriented Architecture to the Tactical Domain: Road Map for Success
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a new system-design pattern used in the commercial domain, has technologies and principles that can significantly reduce lifecycle development costs when integrating, designing and evolving diverse systems. It is not just a buzzword. SOA and its associated technologies have been proven in commercial industry and now run the stock market, the banking industry and other immense integrated spaces.
Despite these successes and the great military demand for SOA, it has not been widely used in the tactical domain. This is because SOA technologies do not fully meet military requirements such as tactical deterministic reliable messaging and information assurance. Raytheon is working to change that, and our skill in applying SOA to emerging military applications will be a powerful discriminator in demonstrating our world-class capabilities as a Mission Systems Integrator (MSI).
Raytheon's extended SOA technology can reduce the time needed to integrate legacy military applications from months or years to days. These integrated applications can then use a library of Raytheon-developed common services to extend their existing capabilities and lower lifecycle costs.
What Is SOA?
SOA is an evolution of object oriented programming that allows open reuse of software across multiple software environments and infrastructures. SOA technologies, such as an enterprise service bus (ESB), not only allow tightly coupled monolithic stove-piped applications to run as they do today, but also make such applications available as SOA services. SOA services publish and subscribe information to each other in a standardized infrastructure to allow a dynamic flow of information.
However SOA is not "just" an infrastructure-provided magic bullet that can instantly solve every integration problem. Actually, ~40 percent of SOA design is the process of correctly defining–refining–wrapping services to allow open, understandable and discoverable communication. And ~20 percent is governing a SOA implementation.
Why Is Tactical SOA Important?
Even before the SOA concept emerged, Raytheon's need to provide world-class capability has always led us to champion system interoperability, standards-based development and reusability.
Recently, the Department of Defense (DoD) released several joint 2020 road maps outlining the need to re-engineer a large portion of its existing coupled systems and decouple them into a "systems-of-systems" architecture made up of any sensor and any shooter. This architecture defines that existing systems have capabilities such as engage-launch on composite remote, distributed algorithms-information, common services, global resource management and global command and control. This integration challenge is the natural domain of SOA technology, and DoD system acquisition requirements have changed accordingly.
However, the government SOA specifications only define basic SOA technology standards that, in their current form, are not sufficiently complete to meet the tactical performance needs of the systems they govern. In addition, raw commercial infrastructures cannot meet these performance needs either, despite many marketing claims. Raytheon is therefore extending SOA technologies to meet these tactical performance requirements. We must understand, develop, use and lead tactical SOA to remain a Mission Systems Integrator of choice and implement the "system of systems" concept.
Despite our competitors' assertions that "system of systems" integration is just an IT infrastructure problem, the heart of the challenge lies in the governance and service design. An in-depth knowledge of existing systems is needed to re-architect existing applications into reusable, discoverable services, and then only a tactically extended SOA infrastructure can actually meet customers' needs. To address this challenge, Raytheon is driving a tactical SOA infrastructure and pulling functionality from its deployed programs into common services for use in that infrastructure.
How Are We Driving Tactical SOA?
Our strategy for driving world-class tactical SOA technologies is to actively drive standards and extend the technologies of commercial companies. Raytheon has used its experience to merge SOA technologies with tactical technologies and affect our partners' road maps.
The technology evolution shown in the accompanying road map describes at a high level where we are driving tactical SOA technologies with our industry partners. Our unique tactical SOA will have advantages in hard real-time speed requirements, interoperability, security, information assurance and other requirements of the tactical domain.
The Raytheon Tactical SOA Steering Group
To coordinate the internal-external efforts depicted on this road map, the author leads a companywide Tactical SOA Steering Group created from the Mission Critical SOA Technology Interest Group (TIG) which he also co-chairs. This steering group currently includes more than a dozen cross-company programs driving infrastructure and reusable services.
The steering group ensures that each of the member's products is interoperable and that we create a tactical SOA story as one company. The group enables us to provide a unique composition of a tactical SOA infrastructure and a library of reusable common services for new and legacy programs of multiple requirements. Raytheon employees who want to support this technology or group may contact the author or join the Mission Critical SOA TIG.
