Open Standards and Interoperability in the Army

As the Army Common Operating Environment (COE) matures and begins to deliver capability products from each of the computing environments (CEs), we start to see the challenges of integrating these products as foundational building blocks for the many diverse Army programs.  For example, the sensor CE must develop a capability set to discover, share, manage, and enable critical situation awareness data/products at all echelons and all networks.  This capability set must be provided in a set of products that allows the many different and disparate environments and platforms served by the Army sensor CE to interoperate. The sensor CE infrastructure must be highly modular, scalable, and flexible, providing sensing, processing, exploitation, and enabling capabilities using a system-of-systems approach to harness emerging technology.  This approach leads to architectures developed to enable greater access to sensor data for dynamic correlation—fusion to achieve unparalleled situation understanding for Mission Command decisions and actions throughout the echelons, including the disconnected, intermittent, and limited environments found in the soldier edge nodes.  To this end, the Army COE sensor CE has adopted integrated sensor architecture as their baseline capability.