Challenges in Engineering Distributed Shipboard Control Systems

Although the end of the Cold War minimized the threat of massive open ocean naval combat, new littoral warfare missions and scenarios involving both combined arms and joint allied operations, have emerged. New threats, missions and operating environments present a greater challenge to target identification, reaction time, command and control, and tracking and weapons accuracy, requiring even more computer automation and data processing than in the past. As new systems designed to meet these challenges enter fleet service, it is increasingly difficult to engineer cost effective computing systems with traditional military standard computing resources. The expected growth in required computing capacity cannot be satisfied by scaling the current military standard computer system resources. The basic problem is that the current Aegis computer suite has run out of capacity, and the architecture, based on Navy standard computers and architecturally limiting point-to-point interfaces, lacks the scalability needed to add the required new capacity. A longer term, cost effective solution, based on full use of commercial computing resources and capable of being expanded over a distributed pool of resources as requirements grow, is needed.