Operational architectures for the Joint Battlespace Infosphere

The Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) is a combat information system that will provide warfighters with tailored information necessary to accomplish their missions. In this paper we explore the first levels of decomposition for a possible operational architecture to create mission-specific JBI and define the role that mission-specific operational architectures play in that process. The concepts presented in this paper build upon similar concepts developed and successfully proven as effective for the modeling and simulation (M and S) community. In M and S, as in JBI, the key is determining the right information to push to the right people at the right time based on a sound representation of military operations and documented in an operational architecture. The Functional Description of the Mission Space (FDMS) program has set the standard for the definition of operational architectures to drive M and S development and the High Level Architecture (HLA) provides JBI-like publish/subscription intelligent routing of data for simulations and systems with which they interoperate, such as C4ISR systems.