Interoperability requirements for a South African joint command and control test facility

Abstract

The South African National Defence Force is in the process of establishing a Joint Command and Control Test Facility at a National Research Institute. The goal with this facility is to provide an integrated environment for Joint Command and Control doctrine development. This requires support for planning, development, experimentation and preparation for concept evaluation, demonstrator implementation, computer-aided field exercises and interoperability testing. A service-orientated architectural approach is followed to provide all the necessary services, mechanisms and functionalities. Since simulations and simulators form part of such a facility, interoperability standards are very important, as well as the underlying data model. The high-level requirements for these, as well as the architecture, are presented in this paper for the test facility