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CSI Colloquium

Co-sponsored by:
Systems Engineering and Operations Research
and the C4I Center

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From Stovepipes to Networked Systems of Systems: Technology Challenges and Solution Paths

Dr. Kathryn Blackmond Laskey
Associate Director, C4I Center
Systems Engineering and Operations Research

Thursday, October 26, 2006

ABSTRACT

In the old days, we lived in a world of stovepipe systems. A stovepipe system is designed to perform specific functions in constrained contexts, employs its own idiosyncratic problem and data representations, and operates in isolation from other systems except through exchange of data prepared in specialized formats. In the old days, important assumptions about problem and model semantics were at best documented in paper manuals, and at worst buried in undocumented code and the minds of system designers. Translating outputs of one system into a form that could be processed by another system was typically a labor-intensive task with a heavy judgmental component, due to fundamental and frequently undocumented differences in problem and data representation.

Today, we are rushing headlong into a world of Net-Centric systems. A Net-Centric system is a system of autonomous, self-synchronizing, seamlessly inter-operating software agents that understand each other's explicitly represented semantics, and coordinate with each other to ensure that each agent has timely access to mission-critical information without being overloaded with extraneous information. In the rush of enthusiasm, it is easy for the technically unsophisticated to fall into the fallacy that pushing ever-greater volumes of data across a network with ever-expanding bandwidth will somehow magically bring the Net-Centric world into being. Technologists understand that innovations like this do not happen by magic. Advances in network, sensor and data dissemination infrastructure are enablers, but they must be employed effectively by processes to manage the information supply chain. This presentation lays out some of the technical challenges that need to be addressed to bring the Net-Centric vision into being, with special attention to research problems in computational and data sciences.