Defense Domain Research Articles

A Container-based Trusted Multi-level Security Mechanism

Multi-level security mechanism has been widely applied in the military, government, defense and other domains in which information is required to be divided by security-level. Through this type of security mechanism, users at different security levels are provided with information at corresponding security levels. Traditional multi-level security mechanism which depends on the safety of operating system finally proved to be not practical. We propose a container-based trusted multi-level security mechanism in this paper to improve the applicability of the multi-level mechanism. It guarantees multi-level security of the system through a set of multi-level security policy rules and trusted techniques. The technical feasibility and application scenarios are also discussed. The ease of realization, strong practical significance and low cost of our method will largely expand the application of multi-level security mechanism in real life.

Architectural work for modeling and simulation combining the NATO Architecture Framework and C3 Taxonomy

To provide modeling and simulation functionality as services is strategically leveraged in the defense domain and elsewhere. To describe and understand the context, the ecosystem, wherein such services are used and interoperate with other services and capabilities, one needs tools that capture the simulation services themselves as well as the capability landscape they operate in. By using the NATO Consultation, Command, and Control (C3) Taxonomy to structure architecture design in the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF), cohesive descriptions of modeling and simulation capabilities within larger contexts can be given. We show how a basic seven-step approach may benefit architecture work for modeling and simulation at the overarching, reference, and target architectural levels; in particular for (1) hybrid architectures that embed simulation architectures within a larger service-oriented architecture and (2) for architectural design of simulation scenarios. Central to the approach is the use of the C3 Taxonomy as a repository for overarching architecture building blocks and patterns. We conclude that the promotion of technical functionality as capabilities in their own right helps delineate simulation environment boundaries, helps delineate services within and outside the boundary, and is an enabler for defining the service concepts in cloud-based approaches to modeling and simulation as a service (MSaaS).

Semantic Technologies and Big Data Analytics for Cyber Defence

The Governments, military forces and other organisations responsible for cybersecurity deal with vast amounts of data that has to be understood in order to lead to intelligent decision making. Due to the vast amounts of information pertinent to cybersecurity, automation is required for processing and decision making, specifically to present advance warning of possible threats. The ability to detect patterns in vast data sets, and being able to understanding the significance of detected patterns are essential in the cyber defence domain. Big data technologies supported by semantic technologies can improve cybersecurity, and thus cyber defence by providing support for the processing and understanding of the huge amounts of information in the cyber environment. The term big data analytics refers to advanced analytic techniques such as machine learning, predictive analysis, and other intelligent processing techniques applied to large data sets that contain different data types. The purpose is to detect patterns, correlations, trends and other useful information. Semantic technologies is a knowledge representation paradigm where the meaning of data is encoded separately from the data itself. The use of semantic technologies such as logic-based systems to support decision making is becoming increasingly popular. However, most automated systems are currently based on syntactic rules. These rules are generally not sophisticated enough to deal with the complexity of decisions required to be made. The incorporation of semantic information allows for increased understanding and sophistication in cyber defence systems. This paper argues that both big data analytics and semantic technologies are necessary to provide counter measures against cyber threats. An overview of the use of semantic technologies and big data technologies in cyber defence is provided, and important areas for future research in the combined domains are discussed.

Accelerated simulation of hierarchical military operations with tabulation technique

Recently, a challenge in defence modelling and simulation is that simulating a satisfactory number of scenarios often requires an infeasible runtime. This paper resolves this challenge by utilizing a tabulation technique that encourages reuses of the previous simulation results in hierarchical models. For example, a mission-level model may contain a number of similar engagement scenarios that must be executed multiple times by an engagement-level model. Therefore, we collapse the multiple similar executions into a single simulation run while verifying the statistical stability in the output distribution. This reuse is supported by adapting the tabulation technique to hierarchical models with the extension of an interpolation in matching the lower abstractions. An application in the naval air defence domain shows that the simulation is speeded up a maximum of seven times, while producing statistically identical simulation results with few increments in the variance.

The Human Factors of Cyber Network Defense

Technology’s role in the fight against malicious cyber-attacks is critical to the increasingly networked world of today. Yet, technology does not exist in isolation: the human factor is an aspect of cyber-defense operations with increasingly recognized importance. Thus, the human factors community has a unique responsibility to help create and validate cyber defense systems according to basic principles and design philosophy. Concurrently, the collective science must advance. These goals are not mutually exclusive pursuits: therefore, toward both these ends, this research provides cyber-cognitive links between cyber defense challenges and major human factors and ergonomics (HFE) research areas that offer solutions and instructive paths forward. In each area, there exist cyber research opportunities and realms of core HFE science for exploration. We raise the cyber defense domain up to the HFE community at-large as a sprawling area for scientific discovery and contribution.

Model-based tool support for Tactical Data Links: an experience report from the defence domain

The Tactical Data Link (TDL) allows the exchange of information between cooperating platforms as part of an integrated command and control ($$C^2$$C2) system. Information exchange is facilitated by adherence to a complex, message-based protocol defined by document-centric standards. In this paper, we report on a recent body of work investigating migration from a document-centric to a model-centric approach within the context of the TDL domain, motivated by a desire to achieve a positive return on investment. The model-centric approach makes use of the Epsilon technology stack and provides a significant improvement to both the level of abstraction and rigour of the network design. It is checkable by a machine and, by virtue of an MDA-like approach to the separation of domains and model transformation between domains, is open to integration with other models to support more complex workflows, such as by providing the results of interoperability analyses in human-readable domain-specific reports conforming to an accepted standard.

Indoor channel characterization studies for V-band gigabit wireless communications using dielectric-loaded exponentially tapered slot antenna

Demands for very high-speed wireless communication access is rapidly growing with respect to the increasing data rates for the use of rich multimedia content in various applications of defense, enterprise, industrial, and public domains. To serve these gigabit fidelity (Gi-Fi) uses for various wireless applications, millimeter wave (MmW) wireless technology with huge bandwidth in licensed/unlicensed bands is triggering boundless avenues. In this research, the concept of substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) and exponentially tapered slot (ETS) antenna are used together design a high-gain, efficient planar dielectric-loaded antenna for MmW-based Gi-Fi wireless communications using unlicensed 60 GHz band in the MmW family. The SIW is used to feed the antenna and a dielectric is utilized increasing the gain. The dielectric-loaded ETS antenna and compact SIW feed are fabricated on a single substrate, resulting in low cost and easy fabrication utilizing printed circuit board process. The measured gain of single-element antenna is 11.4 dB, with radiation efficiency of 96.84% at 60 GHz. Then indoor radio wave propagation studies are carried out using elliptically dielectric-loaded ETS antenna with radio frequency measurement equipment to measure and model propagation channels at 60 GHz. The attained simulations are compared with the experimental results.

Biocompatible enzymatic roller pens for direct writing of biocatalytic materials: "do-it-yourself" electrochemical biosensors.

The development of enzymatic-ink-based roller pens for direct drawing of biocatalytic sensors, in general, and for realizing renewable glucose sensor strips, in particular, is described. The resulting enzymatic-ink pen allows facile fabrication of high-quality inexpensive electrochemical biosensors of any design by the user on a wide variety of surfaces having complex textures with minimal user training. Unlike prefabricated sensors, this approach empowers the end user with the ability of "on-demand" and "on-site" designing and fabricating of biocatalytic sensors to suit their specific requirement. The resulting devices are thus referred to as "do-it-yourself" sensors. The bio-active pens produce highly reproducible biocatalytic traces with minimal edge roughness. The composition of the new enzymatic inks has been optimized for ensuring good biocatalytic activity, electrical conductivity, biocompati-bility, reproducible writing, and surface adherence. The resulting inks are characterized using spectroscopic, viscometric, electrochemical, thermal and microscopic techniques. Applicability to renewable blood glucose testing, epidermal glucose monitoring, and on-leaf phenol detection are demonstrated in connection to glucose oxidase and tyrosinase-based carbon inks. The "do-it-yourself" renewable glucose sensor strips offer a "fresh," reproducible, low-cost biocatalytic sensor surface for each blood test. The ability to directly draw biocatalytic conducting traces even on unconventional surfaces opens up new avenues in various sensing applications in low-resource settings and holds great promise for diverse healthcare, environmental, and defense domains.

Prerequisites and necessary measures for efficient and effective contribution of the Serbian Armed Forces to missions and operations of the EU common security and defense policy

The Republic of Serbia's accession to the European Union is its strategic interest and a process that has been inevitably in progress, particularly as off receiving the date and opening the talks. A special aspect of this accession is the domain of security and defense, namely the EU common security and defense policy. What specially stands out in this domain is the contribution of the Serbian Armed Forces to EU-led peacekeeping missions and operations. This contribution has so far been symbolic, with indications of an increase in terms of resources of the Serbian Armed Forces.

The Interparliamentary Conference on the CFSP/CSDP: A new forum for the Oireachtas in Irish and EU foreign policy?

This article reviews the Interparliamentary Conference (IPC) on the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) since its establishment in 2012. In light of the increasing cavities and skewed power balances between executives and legislatures in the policy domains of foreign affairs, security and defence, compounded by the loss of institutional influence experienced by national parliaments as a result of the European integration process, interparliamentarianism within the EU has seen significant growth over the past number of years. One of the most recent creatures of this new interparliamentary phenomenon relates to the EU's foreign policy—the IPC on the CFSP/CSDP. This article contends that the IPC has a long way to go to become a proper forum for democratic and parliamentary oversight of the EU's foreign policy, and also questions whether such interparliamentary activity in its current state is worth the effort at all. Nonetheless, the paper concludes that given the extremely weak position the Oireachtas finds itself in when it comes to oversight and scrutiny by parliamentary committees, Irish members of the IPC on the CFSP/CSDP could learn much from how other EU member state national parliaments play a meaningful role in relation to their respective foreign policies. An increased level of participation in this sectoral area by Irish members of the IPC could spark the potential to implement the best practices and procedure than seen elsewhere in the EU, back at home in Leinster House.

The most significant influences on the defense capability of the Republic of Serbia (criteria for determining the size of armed forces in peace and wartime)

Many factors have an influence on the defense capability of every country, including the Republic of Serbia. They can be classified into three main groups: external, internal, and demographic. Each of these groups exerts different influences, in terms of their transparency, number, and importance. In the contemporary international community, many elements in the domain of defense of large and developed countries are joined, and in small and underdeveloped countries they have been transferred to or dependent on collective defense systems. Especially important is the group of demographic factors, according to which the scope/size of armed forces is determined in contemporary circumstances, as the basic postulate of defense of the highest values of a country/society. It is therefore necessary to more closely define the concept of 'defense', in order to approach to further consideration of its function and the forces to perform it. In the international community there are three main criteria by which the scope/size of the armed forces of every country is determined or calculated: the size of the territory, the scope of the mobilization efforts of the population and the number of strategic approaches to be closed by the armed forces at all times. They are directly conditioned by: the position of the country in the international community, and the country's socio­political and economic capability. Based on these criteria and the above-mentioned elements the paper examines all relevant influences on the defense capability of Serbia.

가치기반 엔터프라이즈 아키텍처 프레임워크: VBEAF

지금까지 자크만 프레임워크를 포함하여 국방 분야의 DoDAF, 행정 분야의 FEAF, TEAF, 산업 분야의 TOGAF 등 다양한 엔터프라이즈 아키텍처 프레임워크(EAF)가 제안되어 왔다. 이들 EAF는 각 도메인을 지원하기 위한 EA 관점을 정의하고, 관점 별로 모델 및 계층을 제시하고 있다. 또한 이들 EAF는 계층 별 모델들 간 일관되게 연결되어 있으며 타 프레임워크의 모델과 연계할 수 있다는 장점을 가지고 있다. 그렇지만 이들은 너무 많은 계층을 포함하고 있어 복잡도가 높거나, 명확한 아키텍처 기술을 위한 모델을 제시하고 있기 않다. 특히, 기업의 궁극적 지향인 비즈니스 가치를 고려하고 있지 않고, 이를 달성하기 위한 비즈니스 프로세스와의 실천적 연결이 부족하다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 비즈니스 도메인의 특수성을 반영하여 비즈니스 가치 달성에 중요한 비즈니스 프로세스와의 실천적 연결을 고려한 가치기반 엔터프라이즈 아키텍처 프레임워크를 제안한다. Until now there have been many kinds of enterprise architecture frameworks including the DoDAF in defense domain, the FEAF in administration domain, and the TEAF in finance domain. These EAFs define EA viewpoints for supporting each domain and propose perspectives and models for each viewpoint. These EAFs provide consistent models from different perspectives that interact with each other. However, they have too many perspectives so that their complexities are too high, or they do not define enough models for concrete architecture description. Especially, they neither consider business values, that mean the ultimate purpose of an organization nor execute processes for achieving the business values. This paper thus proposes the VBEAF, business value based enterprise architecture framework that considers and executes business values in organizational business processes.

Modeling Intelligent Decision-Making Command and Control Agents: An Application to Air Defense

The paper is a half-way between the agent technology and the mathematical reasoning to model tactical decision making tasks. These models are applied to air defense (AD) domain for command and control (C2). It also addresses the issues related to evaluation of agents. The agents are designed and implemented using the agent-programming paradigm. The agents are deployed in an air combat simulated environment for performing the tasks of C2 like electronic counter counter measures, threat assessment, and weapon allocation. The simulated AD system runs without any human intervention, and represents state-of-the-art model for C2 autonomy. The use of agents as autonomous decision making entities is particularly useful in view of futuristic network centric warfare.

An analytical approach to defining strategic options in a case of developing multimodal transport in the Army of Serbia

Limited resources in the defense domain impose the acceptance of an analytical, essentially economic, management point of view. There is a necessity to use available resources rationally and to implement sustainable development strategies, defined on the basis of proper understanding and analyses of internal and external environment.

Research on Modeling and Simulation of Networked Air & Missile Defense

As a Network Centric Warfare (NCW) case applied in Air & Missile Defense domain, Networked Air & Missile Defense (NAMD) represents the superior development of the Air & Missile Defense warfare in future. Based on the ideology of Integrated Fire Control, architecture and characteristics of NAMD are depicted, and simulation models based on above depictions are designed. Finally, operational capabilities of NAMD are generally evaluated, and the rationalities of decision-making script and model framework are validated by concentrating on results of an operational scenario simulation.

국방 분야의 인간-차량 인터랙션 연구

We present recent human-vehicle interaction (HVI) research conducted in the area of defense and military application. Research topics discussed in this paper include: training simulation for overland navigation tasks; expertise effects in overland navigation performance and scan patterns; pilot’s perception and confidence on an overland navigation task; effects of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) supervisory control on F-18 formation flight performance in a simulator environment; autonomy balancing in a manned-unmanned teaming (MUT) swarm attack, enabling visual detection of IED (Improvised Explosive Device) indicators through Perceptual Learning Assessment and Training; usability test on DaViTo (Data Visualization Tool); and modeling peripheral vision for moving target search and detection. Diverse and leading HVI study in the defense domain suggests future research direction in other HVI emerging areas such as automotive industry and aviation domain.

상호운용성을 요구하는 복합시스템 개발에서 DoD 아키텍처 프레임워크를 활용한 안전성 확보에 관한 연구

The recent trend in the war fields on the globe may be characterized by the network-centric warfare, which would, in turn, make the concept of weapon systems be changed. To this end, the concept of system of systems (SoS) has been introduced in literature. An SoS is a collection of multiple systems, each of which is an independent system and can be interoperable with each other. Thus, in defense domain each SoS is a big weapon system as a whole operated in actual environment and each element of it is also an independent smaller weapon system, but they should be interoperable via network among each other. The safety results studied for each elementary system alone may not be fully applicable to the whole SoS. As such, the objective of this paper is to study how to make the SoS safety requirements be distributed down over the interoperable elementary systems. Since handling the interoperability requires a technique of systems architecture, a standard method called the DoD Architectural Framework (DoDAF) has been used here to derive a solution. Using DoDAF, the safety requirements were first analyzed in the operability environment. The results were then studied to be included in an integrated model of both the systems design and safety processes. A further study of present paper would facilitate ensuring safety in the development of SoS weapon systems in practice.

Homeland situation awareness through mining and fusing heterogeneous information from intelligence databases and field sensors

One of the most felt issues in the defence domain is that of having huge quantities of data stored in databases and acquired from field sensors without being able to infer information from them. Usually, databases are continuously updated with observations, and are related to heterogeneous data. Deep and continuous analysis on the data could mine useful correlations, explain relations existing among data and cue searches for further evidences. The solution to the problem addressed before seems to deal both with the domain of data mining and with the domain of high level data fusion. The focus of this paper is the definition of an architecture for a system adopting data mining techniques to adaptively discover clusters of information and relation among them, to classify observations acquired and to use the model of knowledge and the classification derived in order to assess situations, threats and refine the search for evidences.

MND-SCEMP: an empirical study of a software cost estimation modeling process in the defense domain

The primary focus of weapon systems research and development has moved from a hardware base to a software base and the cost of software development is increasing gradually. An accurate estimation of the cost of software development is now a very important task in the defense domain. However, existing models and tools for software cost estimation are not suitable for the defense domain due to problems of accuracy. Thus, it is necessary to develop cost estimation models that are appropriate to specific domains. Furthermore, most studies of methodology development are aligned with generic methodologies that do not consider the pertinent factors to specific domains, whereas new methodologies should reflect specific domains. In this study, we apply two generic methodologies to the development of a software cost estimation model, before suggesting an integrated modeling process specifically for the national defense domain. To validate our proposed modeling process, we performed an empirical study of 113 software development projects on weapon systems in Korea. A software cost estimation model was developed by applying the proposed modeling process. The MMRE value of this model was 0.566 while the accuracy was appropriate for use. We conclude that the modeling process and software cost estimation model developed in this study is suitable for estimating resource requirements during weapon system development in South Korea's national defense domain. This modeling process and model may facilitate more accurate resource estimation by project planners, which will lead to more successful project execution.

7.5.1 An incremental hybridisation of heterogeneous case studies to develop an ontology for capability engineering

AbstractAn analysis of perspectives for “capability engineering” has been conducted by the INCOSE UK Capability Working Group (CWG). This paper is a continuation of this study led by the CWG ontology work stream that aims to develop a single shared ontology for the concept of capability engineering to enable semantic interoperability and to support a formal and explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. Case study material from the different domains of rail, defence and information services was used. The ontology development was executed in three phases; (1) pre‐analysis, (2) ontology modelling and (3) post‐analysis. The pre‐analysis involved literature reviews, requirements specification, systems engineering process utilisation; and resource identification i.e. examination of the case study material. The ontology modelling phase comprised information extraction and classification in addition to modelling and code representation using a mark‐up tool, MS Excel and Protégé. The post‐analysis involved validation workshops through using expert focus groups.