Supporting C2 Research and Evaluation: An Infrastructure and its Potential Impact

The lifecycle management of Command and Control and Command, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) technologies depends on test data for research, development, testing, evaluation, maintenance, and sustainment. Creating the infrastructure necessary to support these activities is difficult and expensive. Progress has been slow and empirical data on the cost and effectiveness of C4ISR technologies remain poorly documented. Many data sets are becoming obsolete because they do not conform to new data formats that enable integration, fusion, flexibility, and reasoning. These data sets will require significant transformational effort to remain useful. To address these problems the design and construction of an infrastructure is in progress to support controlled experimentation with emerging C4ISR technologies. This paper describes the challenges to researchers and evaluators of C4ISR systems. The paper features a survey of publicly available data sources, characterizations of data suitability, and any required transformation. A repository is in progress to address these challenges. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential impact of this infrastructure on C4ISR research and technology. Presented at the International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (16th) Quebec City, Canada on 21-23 June 2011. Published in the Proceedings of the International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (16th), June 2011.