PHYSICAL SCIENCES INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N201-033

Description

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) will develop a real-time, open architecture, data storage software component, and corresponding data model, as a key enabling element of a distributed common operating picture (DCOP) capability for future naval combat systems. The Dynamic Data Store (DDS) allows representation of all national, coalition, and adversary platforms and systems, their capabilities and status, as well as the sensor data and derived tracks fused and synchronized across the battle group. To provide a robust and standardized structure for this complex array of information, we employ the JOINT C3 INFORMATION EXCHANGE DATA MODEL (JC3IEDM) as the foundation for the data store data model. PSI proposes to leverage the extensibility of the JC3IEDM model to incorporate additional descriptive frames for defining the technical capabilities of the various sensors deployed across the battle group, and for representing the streaming data measurements from these sensors which must be distributed and synchronized across the combat systems in real time. To allow seamless upgrade of both software capabilities as well as sensors and data types, the DDS design allows several forms of on-the-fly extension during combat system operation with minimal impact on the availability of the combat system. First, the DDS is able to load extensions to the currently-loaded data model, to inject additional data types and attribute definitions for the stored data entities. These additional data types and codes will automatically become available to applications running across the platform, without requiring any restart or recompilation of any software modules. Second, the DDS is designed to operate within a loadable software component environment, where software modules implementing various capabilities may be loaded or replaced individually during execution without impacting the operation of peer components. The DDS itself is designed to operate as a component within this environment, and is also designed to provide a highly generic interface to client components which access the data entities stored by the DDS. This interface mechanism allows efficient query, retrieval, and update to stored data objects with a small set of variant-based data structures, so that the interface is independent of the actual data schema (JC3IEDM) and will not need to be changed as the schema evolves.