| Abstrakt: |
A 2005 Defense Science Board report on aerial targets concluded that future control systems and components must be made common across the Services so that Services may operate on any national range. This report led to a 2007 Director of Test fis? Evaluation memo (Daly, 2007) chartering the Target Control Steering Group (TCSG), funded through the Target Management Initiative (TMI), to facilitate a systems analysis and formulation of a joint technical approach to achieving common control elements (CCE) across the targets' commonality and, if warranted, to develop and demonstrate technical approaches. These CCE's and technical approaches could then be adopted by the Services in new systems or into existing systems, as deemed appropriate. Such adoption of CCE's and technical approaches led to increased interoperability, lower costs of operation, optimization of TMI initiative integration, and mitigation of integration risk. This article reports on the current state of the targets environment, the TCSG charter and goals, the operation and results of the study group, and the results of sponsored demonstrations. The TCSG surveyed the technical approaches for target control across the national ranges, and through use of the Modular Open System Approach (MOSA) a set of common elements and interfaces were identified. The identified common elements and interfaces were considered by the TCSG as candidates for development of an open standard to enable common element interoperability. The TCSG also sponsored demonstrations of a portion of these interfaces, resulting in successful live tests. The TCSG also vetted several proposals for the TMI in the area of target control. Such proposals were evaluated and recommendations were made to the TMI consistent with the TMI goals of common control elements and technical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
