Governance of Data Initialization for Service Oriented Architecture-based Military Simulation and Command and Control Federations

Military simulation and command and control federations have become large, complex distributed systems that integrate with a variety of legacy and current simulations, and real command and control systems locally as well as globally. As these systems continue to become increasingly more complex so does the data that initializes them.This increased complexity has introduced a major problem in data initialization coordination, which has been handled by many organizations in various ways. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions have been introduced to promote easier data interoperability through the use of standards-based reusable services and common infrastructure. However, current SOA-based solutions do not incorporate formal governance techniques to drive the architecture in providing reliable, consistent, and timely information exchange. This article identifies the need to establish governance for data service development oversight, presents current research and applicable solutions that address some aspects of SOA-based federation data service governance, and proposes a conceptual governance reference model for initialization of data in SOA-based simulation, and command and control federations.