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The tactical edge domain, primarily consisting of dismounted soldiers and vehicles on the move, are typically interconnected via wireless tactical networks that are limited in terms of bandwidth, reachability, reliability, and latency. Hence, nodes in the tactical network cannot simply rely on assured access to enterprise cloud computing. Instead, they must explore other alternative models to leverage resources that are in situ, by means of a federated cloud architecture that spans the three tiers of dismounted soldiers, vehicles on the move, and operations centers. The NATO IST-168 RTG has been exploring approaches to best exploit available resources in such a federated architecture while living within the constraints of the tactical networks. The first approach has been to evaluate Kubernetes technologies to see if they are able to be deployed over tactical networks and provide the capabilities to dynamically distribute data and computing tasks over a federated cloud infrastructure composed of multiple partner nation networks. This paper provides initial performance results for various Kubernetes distributions (K8s, K3s, KubeEdge) in federated and adaptive tactical networks, leading to recommendations for further development and experimentation.

In military mission contexts with limited network connectivity, availability and utilization of information may be improved through adaptive information processing over a federated cloud infrastructure. Orchestration mechanisms to dynamically distribute data and computing tasks over the available partner cloud infrastructures enable improved exploitation of the information processing, storage, and communication means that are ever more available and powerful in battlefield situations.

Although ever more and powerful information collection, processing, storage, and communication devices are available, disadvantaged battlefield connectivity currently prevents full exploitation of the potentially available information. An infrastructure for adaptive information processing and distribution may improve this situation by providing advanced and autonomous orchestration mechanisms for real-time data exchange and service execution. This paper provides an overview of the work being done on this topic within the NATO IST-168 RTG: its ambition, architectural approach and status. © 2019 IEEE.

Engineering of requirements is not supported directly in the metamodels of common Enterprise Architecture Frameworks, such as the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF). This problem has been addressed in a recent study that proposed a “Requirements View” as an extension to the NAF metamodel [4]. Based on this we introduce a methodology to determine how well requirements are covered by an architecture model in order to further integrate requirements engineering and architecture modelling and to support a project manager in tracking project progress.

In the NATO enterprise architecture world, architectural elements and requirements of a project usually are managed separately. As architects have to connect both worlds, they struggle with using different tools, having little traceability and a lack of analysis options. In this paper, we present our extension to the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) as well as a process for connecting and managing requirements and architecture elements. We also created an implementation of the process as a set of scripts which were applied successfully to a set of real world requirements.

Development of military software is mainly done by large companies specialized on the military domain. For security reasons high barriers for market entry exist, which excludes small companies and independent developers. This leads to monopolization inducing long development cycles as well as labored and cost-intensive development processes. The idea of a military app store as a distribution platform for military software could be one way to overcome these issues. Enabling independent developers and small companies to develop software for such an app store fosters agile and fast software development targeted to the users demands. However for security reasons this is not possible today. This paper presents a concept for a development process that enables independent developers to write software for the military domain. Our concept lowers the barrier for market entry significantly while keeping the high security standards. Opening the development process in such a way is an important prerequisite for the realization of military app stores.

An integrated high-throughput tool for forced degradation studies during pharmaceutical development is described. A series of experiments are conducted with the Symyx Technologies (Santa Clara, CA) Automated Forced Degradation System. The hardware and software of the workflow are described. Degradation libraries of stressed samples of liquid formulations of drug A were created, analyzed for room temperature solubility, and then replicates of each library were heated and sampled over time at 55, 70, and 85 °C to monitor for parent product degradation. Library arrays of first-order kinetic plots were generated, and predictions of room temperature stability were made. Several viable solution formulations were identified. (JALA 2005;10:374–80)

A wind tunnel test of an off-the-shelf scale model of the Edge 540 aerobatic aircraft shows substantial improvement of pitch and yaw authority upon application of propeller wash, without markedly changing the qualitative aerodynamic response. High thrust at low advance ratio linearizes the response of control surfaces (elevator, rudder; and to a lesser extent, ailerons) and delays stall. This offers potential for simplification of aerodynamic models for Unmanned Air Vehicles in maneuvering situations, in gust-response, and for unconventional vehicles transitioning from wingborne to rotor-borne flight. Calculation with the panel-method PMARC was surprisingly successful, at least at low angles of attack. On the other hand, a modern Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes computation (AVUS) was seen to underpredict both zero-lift drag and maximum lift coefficient, ironically suggesting that lower-order methods may be superior not only in implementation but in accuracy. Experimental uncertainty due to control surface hysteresis is a notable complication of using off-the-shelf hobby-airplanes as wind tunnel test articles. Nevertheless, systematic trends in control surface effectiveness with and without propwash were identified.