Joint Tasks to Software Requirements
May 7, 2014
Although ControlPlan was developed as a demonstration of an innovative planning technique within an SBIR under Navy PEO Space, our development team worked to include operational context to the design. To create this context we needed to develop Operational Situations (OPSIT) and Scenarios that were relevant to our customers and stakeholder and to the eventual users of ControlPlan.
The general guidance for the ControlPlan development was to ensure that it could perform optimized planning for any of the five, space mission areas: Communications, Missile Warning, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, Environmental Monitoring and Precision Navigation. For this SBIR, we were asked to focus on Communications planning, specifically for the Multi-User Objective System (MUOS).
To create relevant OPSITs and Scenarios we used the Universal Joint Task List (UJTL), which we downloaded from the Joint Electronic Library. The UJTLs provide a listing of tasks organized by the “Levels of War.” These levels are Strategic National (SN), Strategic Theater (ST) and Operational (OP). The advantage of using the UJTLs is that they provide a “common language and reference system” that allow users from the joint force commander to the trainers to understand the mission tasking. In our case, these terms were useful in helping us understand planning tasks and helped us create the OPSITs and Scenarios to support the development and eventual demonstration of ControlPlan.
Our objective for ControlPlan was to produced optimized plans, or courses-of-action (COA) that establish reconfiguration for a communications satellite. Broadly, we addressed “reconfiguration” as a change to orbit, payload or the satellite bus (i.e. a power casualty). We decided on two OPSITs, one that addressed a co-orbital threat such as a drifting satellite as was the case with Galaxy 15 and the other associated with a ground-based interferer.
We found Strategic-National UJTLs that were related to these OPSITS, SN 3.5.2, Provide Space Control addresses, “protection of US space system...and to provide collision avoidance reports,” and SN 3.5.2.2 Provide Space Protection that addresses protection of “…assets from various threats such as directed energy, RFI and space debris.”
The UJTLs include measures and values the further detail the tasks. In SN 3.5.2 we applied the measure, “(percent)...of space platform orbits must be adjusted…because of conflicts with other space objects.” And in SN 3.5.2.2, “(days)…to locate source of EMI and stop it.”
From these two tasks, their related measures, and the references to the applicable Joint Publications, we were able to develop organizational relations, information exchange requirements and the related data flow diagrams and activity models. The artifacts, traceable to Joint doctrine were used to develop the user interface for ControlPlan and to develop its service oriented architecture within the Joint Space Operations context.