Service-Oriented Integration of Systems for Military Capability

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming established in computing as a means to integrate processing and data across organisations. This paper proposes that system-level integration can benefit from service oriented architectural descriptions and loose coupling between the problem domain requirements and different system solutions. The problem domain is exemplified as military capability, from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), in particular, network enabled capability (NEC). Representations of military capability in the problem domain can be described in terms of processes. The processes are sequences of functions that can be described as services. Then different types of system solutions can implement the described services. Firstly, the paper presents an overview of conceptual SOA and in the context of military capability compares three levels of service integration: business services, systems services and computing services. Secondly, the paper presents a framework for evaluating the performance and effectiveness of service integration to compare different solutions in delivering military capability.