Interoperability Modeling of the C4ISR Systems

Nowadays, as soon as a crisis or a small conflict is emerging throughout the world, coalitions of responsible nations are formed in order to solve it. The expected finality is to aim for an increased efficiency by coordinating their military means and technical systems. In merging these systems, we have to cope with a major problem, which is to make heterogeneous systems cooperate. This heterogeneity, inherent to national design and applications concepts, generates big deficiencies at the interoperability level. Since the solution of making gangways is not easily and reasonably generalized, the right thing to do is to provide all systems entering in a coalition with interoperability mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a formal approach which is relying on three main concepts openness structure of a federation of systems, interoperability space with the definition of an interoperability matrix, intercooperability domain in which we are able to define parameters that allow us to assess interoperability.