Paper presented at IEE People In Control 2001 conference, Manchester
PRocurement Officer Management Information System
List of topics Decision support for specification of C3IS Automated documentation
G. Detsis, L. Dritsas, J. Kostaras Intracom – Defence Programs Defence Systems Development Markopoulo Ave., 190 02 Peania, Athens, Greece.
Key message With the organisation of global C3I knowledge in an appropriate model, formalisation of the specifications and the use of an information system, the procurement officer can be aided by an effective decision support and documentation generation tool.
SYNOPSIS The scope of the proposed paper is to present the research results of Euclid RTP 6.6 project, undertaken by the PROMIS consortium. The aim of the project is to develop an approach to supporting C3IS specification. Procurement officers have to produce a non-ambiguous, consistent and as complete as possible system specification before awarding to an industrial entity an implementation contract for the system. The procurement officers must consider the need for interoperability between the different national C2 systems, use COTS as much as possible and match commercial and military systems together. At the same time, the production of the specification must be available in the shortest time possible. The key to the approach is to consider a specification as a list of all possible interaction objects between the system and its stakeholders. These ‘User Objects’ define the external view of the system in a formal way; they are stored in a repository called ‘Reference Model’. However, unlike usual specifications, they are constrained to comply with C3IS system logic. The specification process is thus scoped down to a simple selection and overall consistency is ensured by a selection triggered automatic constraint propagation. Reference Model Information System (RMIS) is the name of the workshop designed to support this process. When the selection has been completed, the RMIS is able to generate a textual Segment System Specification (SSS), according to 2167 A American DoD standard, including Interface requirements, functional and non-functional requirements. The RMIS approach has been validated through a software demonstrator. This approach proved to be very fruitful because it can be extended to system design, e.g. to the SSDD at the expense of RM completion with C3IS architectural objects.
1 Introduction Whenever a Command and Control System (let us assume a C3IS) is to be acquired, a contractual baseline must be established between the procurement department and the industrial entity selected for system implementation. Producing this baseline is a difficult task. Let us take the most general view of the acquirement process. It typically includes the following phases:
Requirement Engineering Architectural Engineering Configuration Engineering Configuration Assessment
According to the US Department of Defence standard 2167, the process begins with a description of the military environment in which the C3IS (Communication, Command and Control Information System) is meant to work and ends with the production of:
SSS (System Segment Specification) for the requirements SSDD (System Segment Design Description) for Architectural and Configuration Engineering results Configuration Assessment results.
Intermediate assessments may give rise to requirement negotiations when some requirements appear too expensive and must be discarded. The negotiation back loop leads to a better-scoped set of raw requirements and to a new sequence of 4 steps. In this already cumbersome process, we should also understand the need for specifying a C3IS in a minimum amount of time and cost while considering commercial in addition to military standards that evolve rapidly.