ABSTRACT
While designing an open system has its own challenges, there is an acute need for a new testing paradigm that could provide answers to several challenges described in a three-tier structure (Carstairs, 2005). The lowest level, containing the individual systems or programs, does not present a problem. The second tier, consisting of SoS in which interoperability is critical, has not been addressed in a systematic manner. The third tier, the enterprise level, where joint and coalition operations are conducted, is even more problematic. Although current test and evaluation (T&E) systems are approaching adequacy for tier-two challenges, they are not sufficiently well integrated with defined architectures focusing on interoperability to meet those of tier three. To address pragmatic (e.g. mission threads) testing at the second and third tiers, this chapter provides a collaborative distributed environment based on DUNIP, which can also be seen as federation of new and existing facilities or services from commercial, military, and not-for-profit organizations in a netcentric environment. In such an environment, M&S technologies can be exploited to support model-continuity and model-driven design developments, making T&E an integral
part of the design and operations life cycle. The development of such a distributed testing environment would have to comply with Department of Defense (DoD) mandates requiring that the DoD Architecture Framework (DoDAF) (DoDAF Working Group, 2003) be adopted to express high-level system and operational requirements and architectures (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction, 2004). Unfortunately, DoDAF and DoD netcentric mandates pose significant challenges to T&E since DoDAF specifications must be evaluated to see if they meet requirements and objectives, yet they are not expressed in a form that is amenable to such evaluation (Leach, 2007; Mittal, 2006).
