Boeing backs off industry interoperability goal

Boeing's ultimate goal for its rapidly growing modeling and\nsimulation enterprise is no longer to eventually become fully interoperable\nwith similar networks operated by other major defense contractors.

Guy Higgins, vice president of Boeing Advanced Systems' analysis,\nmodeling, simulation and experimentation group, said that most models and\nsimulations do not required detailed data about competitors' platforms, rendering\nfirm links between proprietary corporate laboratories unnecessary.

\"Most of the time we just need to be accurate and by\naccurate it just needs to be about right,\" Higgins said. \"It doesn't need to be\nprecise.\"

Higgins' remarks come four years after the Network Centric Operations\nIndustry Consortium (NCOIC) was formed expressly to create the standards that would\nallow the defense industry's various wargaming centers to communicate with each other.\n

Since 2002, the US defense industry has stood up vast\nmodeling and simulation networks, to include the Boeing Integration Center\n(BIC), Lockheed Martin's Center for Innovation Lighthouse and the Northrop\nGrumman Cyber Warfare Integration Network (CWIN).

Their purpose is to provide a service to military weapons\nbuyers and internal decision-makers, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of\nnew technologies and operational concepts in the digital world to help inform investment\ndecisions.

As each proprietary network was formed, Boeing spearheaded the\neffort to establish the NCOIC to address concerns that the industry was\ncreating \"stovepipe\" modeling and simulation centers that would feed into the\nmilitary's interoperability problem.

However, Boeing's philosophy on the value of interoperable\nnetworks since 2004 has shifted. Networking concepts have until recently been\nguided by Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network is\nproportional to the square of the number of nodes.

New research appearing in 2006, however, claimed that this\nprinciple was incorrect, Higgins said. Instead of increasing at such a high\nrate, new research suggests the increase in value by adding additional network\nusers is significantly more modest, he said.

Nonetheless, Boeing is continuing to dramatically expand the\nnetwork its network of modeling and simulation centers in the US and abroad. Boeing\nhas teamed with Qinitiq in the UK\nto open \"The Portal\" center. In September, Boeing also plans to open a\n7,500ft-squared facility in Suffolk,\n Va.

New modeling and simulation capabilities will be opened in South Korea in 2009, even as the company expands\nsimilar efforts in Japan and\nIndia.\n