Integrating Architecture and Operational Analysis: A Standards-Based Approach

In June 2018, the Department of Defense (DoD) released its Digital Engineering (DE) Strategy. Among other goals, the DE approach aims to provide an enduring, authoritative source of truth (ASoT) and to incorporate technological innovation to improve the engineering practice. Leveraging an interoperability standard to integrate engineering and acquisition disciplines rather than specific tools can help the Government scale up Digital Engineering environments by allowing vendors to integrate their tools into the environments, supporting innovation by vendors and third parties including small businesses. Operational Analysis tools such as Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration and Modeling (AFSIM) are used to evaluate effectiveness of System of Systems (SoS) Architectures in executing Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess (F2T2EA) kill chain across a variety of Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) and environments. MITRE developed a standards-based approach to leverage Architecture models in setting up Operational Analysis runs based on the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard. This approach allows Government teams to explore trade space and place the proposed contractor solution in context informed by CONOPS and threats. The operational analysts can base their analysis on the authoritative source of truth for the system under design. As the Architecture changes, the Operational Analysis can be re-executed based on the updated model. The MITRE Corporation defined a new custom Operational Analysis Setup (OAS) domain as an extension to the OSLC standard, implemented an OAS provider for AFSIM input files, and developed an integration component to target any OAS provider with Architecture data. The integration component thus supports new Operational Analysis tools use in support of new forms of analysis based on the current ASoT. In this paper, we show an example of ingesting and using Architecture data from Cameo in AFSIM simulations via OSLC (including the new OAS domain).