Leveraging Net-Centric Monitoring Techniques with Information Fusion to Increase US Air Force Information Dominance

Applications used in the Air Operations Center (AOC) do not adequately fuse enough data from enough feeds to provide strong situational awareness. Notice to Airman (NOTAMS), weather, maintenance, airborne networks, and AOC infrastructure data can be united in one display to fulfill this need. Master Caution Panel (MCP), developed for the AOC, provides situational awareness of impacts on operations by tying enterprise network components to the operational tasks they support. It monitors those networks, reports the status of mission critical networks and systems, and provides corrective measures for resource degradations and failures. The next generation of MCP, the C2 Resource Management System (C2RMS), extends outside the AOC environment with newer more extensible monitoring capabilities, including the ability to monitor next generation Internet protocol based airborne networks. The addition of the C2RMS Monitor Development Kit (MDK) allows custom monitors to be developed with limited Java/JavaScript programming knowledge. Particularly valuable to the commander and staff is the fused information in a combined situational view portraying the readiness and capability of the aircraft fleet. AOC weather capabilities can be improved significantly. The Joint Weather Impacts System (JWIS) is an extensible Markup language (XML) Web service which provides high fidelity meteorological information to requesting agents. Using the MDK, a custom weather monitor has been developed to display the weather status of US military bases worldwide. Now, one can tell at a glance whether aircraft are capable of operating effectively given the current weather conditions in a specified area. The custom JWIS weather monitor, created with the MDK, is an example of technology that merges weather information with other existing data sources in a way that can improve the overall mission effectiveness of the AOC with little Air Force investment