RA-EKI: A use case for collaborative logistics planning in coalition force deployment

With greater reliance on coalitions for military force deployment, there is a need for organizational collaboration and system interoperability. Interoperability requires full exchange of data, information (contextualized data) and knowledge (actionable information), which ensures that coalition's members will fully collaborate in synchronizing their logistics plans and processes at all echelons. Existing architecture frameworks, such as NATO's Architecture Framework (NAF) and The Open Group architecture Framework (TOGAF), do not support knowledge management, required to process massive amount of data. In order to perform collaborative logistics planning, logisticians and commanders need to access, in a seamless manner, data and information from several domains from systems within the coalition and from external sources such as social media, government and supplier sites, to name a few. The integrated and structured data must then be transformed into information, or contextualized data, and ultimately into actionable information or knowledge. This paper proposes an innovative approach, the Reference Architecture of an Enterprise Knowledge Infrastructure (RA-EKI) that provides a holistic and integrative approach to manage the complete unstructured data to knowledge lifecycle applicable to military logistics planning.