UK MOD and NATO
The Joint Expeditionary Force - Operational Design Model
The Challenge
The UK MOD formed a Joint Expeditionary Force in response to the requirement to commit military capability on numerous operations. These operations vary from non-combatant evacuation operations to complex multi-national, multi-agency war fighting. The more complex operations involved thousands of personnel, and complex weaponry and C4ISR systems.
AsystsU was tasked with building a business architecture (Operational Design Model) that would enable the MOD to understand the requirements for C4ISR capabilities given a number of scenarios.
Our Solution
We worked with Joint User and the three Front Line Commands to identify representative force elements, analyse the operational scenarios and identify the Mission Threads of activity that would be undertaken. These were further developed into component operational activities and information flow analysis was undertaken to determine the information exchange requirement. This assisted in identifying gaps, overlaps, and areas for further investigation and planning.
The architecture was developed in SparX Enterprise Architect, consisting of nearly 1000 use cases to generate over 150 information exchange requirement tables. The entire architecture was automatically transformed into the customer’s architecture tool using in-house software to enable the customer to view, query and exploit the information in the underlying database.
The Result
The seven operational scenarios analysed have provided Joint Forces Command – Information Systems and Services with a foundation business architecture, providing service-level requirements to inform future acquisition programmes. The approach used has been adopted by NATO for modelling Mission Threads for the 34-nation Federated Mission Networking initiative.