Employing Service Orientation to Enable Training as a Service in the U.S. Army

Currently many training systems acquired, fielded and sustained by the U.S. Army are unable to seamlessly comply with a continuously evolving and often complex computational environment. The current state of such training systems must advance to a Training as a Service (TaaS) future state in order to adapt to a volatile defense budget, conform to policy updates, and enhance the training capabilities afforded to the War fighter. TaaS will transform current Army training applications into distributed web-based services, allowing them to be accessible across any location via thin client workstations and wireless mobile devices. The motivation behind this migration is coming from the Common Operating Environment (COE) Architecture Guidance published by the U.S. Army Chief Information Officer and the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology. In order to achieve the COE objectives, the Army recently launched a pilot study on the Common Training Instrumentation Architecture (CTIA). CTIA is the foundation architecture of the Army's Live Training Transformation (LT2) Product Line that provides software infrastructure and services to live training product applications. This paper describes the migration of CTIA to TaaS using a specific set of modern computing technologies that will enable rapid delivery of training capabilities across servers, mobile devices, and heterogeneous platforms. Specifically service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing are considered which can satisfy the requirements of the TaaS and COE, and meet user demands for an enhanced training experience. Furthermore, this paper discusses the approach taken to elicit the future needs of the Army's live training community, and how cloud computing and SOA are leveraged to meet required capabilities. Lastly, this paper discusses some unique considerations on SOA-related security issues.