A real-time operating environment for Army weapon systems

Embedded weapon systems have traditionally been developed independently, both within and across military service organizations. Furthermore, weapon systems developers tend to develop unique solutions to meet specific operational platform requirements. These unique solutions are costly and have little or no reuse potential within and across military service domains. With shrinking budgets and reduced procurements the military has had to rethink the development of these systems in order to leverage from industrial technological advancements, facilitate application reuse, and provide for the incorporation of commercial off the shelf technology/components. The resulting focus of this developmental shift has been to require weapon systems developer's to utilize open standards and common architectures (hardware and software) in order to realize application reuse and weapon system interoperability. The manner in which these open systems standards are defined for Army systems is through the Joint Technical Architecture (JTA). In order to adequately define relevant standards for Army weapon systems, a weapon systems annex was added to the JTA Army and the Weapon Systems Technical Architecture Working Group (WSTAWG) was established. The WSTAWG established Integrated Product Teams (TPTs) to address the development of application programmer interfaces (APIs) to incorporate the requirements for the framework services which exhibited the highest probability for reuse across the domain. The efforts of the WSTAWG OE IPT to develop the common operating environment specification are discussed.