Keywords | communications interoperability, data collection procedures, data management, Interoperability, interoperability assessment, operational analysis, operational assessment |
Background | Within the past few years, the USA Army has begun codify a cogent interoperability strategic plan and policy to more effectively engage and operate with multinational partners. Through this experience, the need was identified for a data framework and assessment methodology to characterize the level of interoperability with a given partner, based on defined levels of interoperability for various domains. In support of this effort, the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) created a tool for data collection, assessment, and data query in open source statistics coding platform, R. The prototype tool known as CIRCuIT (Communications InteRoperability Capabilities appraIsal Table) was deployed in several multinational military exercises to further refine its capabilities and populate a data repository. Based on lessons learned from this experience, CIRCuIT was adapted to become AIMS (the Army Interoperability Measurement System). The USA Headquarters G-3/5/7 office is managing the ongoing development of AIMS. Seven of the 29 partner nations of NATO agreed to conduct interoperability planning in the model created by the USA Army. As such, a universal version of the AIMS tool could be beneficial to these nations as well as NATO as they look to measure interoperability against their respective strategies. |
