Achieving Data Interoperability of Communication Interfaces for Combat System Engineering

System of systems (SoS) engineering ensures that subsystems successfully interoperate with one another via a physical network along with the designed interface specifications. The twofold challenge that motivated the authors is regarding the achievement of the interoperability for an SoS-based combat system as follows: 1) the validation of the interface specifications against the specified requirements at the system-design phase and 2) the verification of the subsystems against the interface specifications at the system-integration phase. To this end, an interoperability validation and verification toolset (IVVT) consisting of the following three components was developed: signal distributor, message collector, and message analyzer. The signal distributor captures the signal data in the middle of the existing communication interfaces, the message collector stores the signals in the form of distinguishable messages, and the message analyzer evaluates the messages by comparing the designed interface specifications that cover the communication syntax and semantics. For the experimentations, the developed IVVT was utilized for the combat systems of real submarines that have been domestically targeted for a renovation project. The objective of the experiments is the validation of the overall designed interface specifications before the development of the subsystems. The empirical results show that 12 fault cases were found in the specifications, some of which are extremely critical; therefore, a preferential validation of the specifications could prevent the incompatibilities between the subsystems during the combat system integration. In a future work, the authors will employ the IVVT for a verification of the developed subsystems to be integrated depending on the validity of the interface specifications.