Systems of Systems

The military relies heavily on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), but GPS access is easily blocked by methods such as jamming. In addition, many environments in which our military operates (inside buildings, in urban canyons, under dense foliage, underwater, and underground) have limited or no GPS access. To solve this challenge, Adaptable Navigation Systems (ANS) seeks to provide GPS-quality PNT to military users regardless of the operational environment.

Today’s interconnected wireless world has led to congested airwaves, making Radio Frequency (RF) management a hot topic. For warfighters overseas, efficiently managing the congested RF spectrum is critical to ensure effective communications and intelligence gathering.

The Arctic region is poised for greater regional significance as polar ice retreats in coming decades. Ship traffic likely will increase during summer months, and commercial activity focused on the sea floor is expected to grow. The Arctic is largely isolated, vast, and environmentally extreme. Remote sensing may offer affordable advantages over traditional methods of monitoring the region—aircraft, satellites or manned ships and submarines—due to the great distances in the Arctic.

The continued growth in unmanned, sensor, and networked devices is expected to drive the need for larger, more capable and more diverse communications systems. Among other enhancements, these systems must improve jam-resistance and low probability of detection to keep pace with adversaries’ growing electronic sophistication and must adapt to fast-changing operational environments. By contrast, today’s military communications architectures are static and inflexible.

System-of-Systems (SoS) architectures are increasingly central in managing defense, national security and urban infrastructure applications. However, it is difficult to model and currently impossible to systematically design such complex systems using existing tools, which has led to inferior performance, unexpected problems and weak resilience.