The ability of the Army to understand, predict, adapt, and exploit the vast array of internetworked things that will be present of the future battlefield is critical to maintaining and increasing its competitive advantage.

The explosive growth of technologies in the commercial sector that exploits

credit: The Verge

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the convergence of cloud computing, ubiquitous mobile communications, networks of data-gathering sensors, and artificial intelligence presents an imposing challenge for the Army.

These Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will give our enemies ever increasing capabilities that must be countered, but commercial developments do not address the unique challenges that the Army will face in using them.

The U. S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has established an Enterprise approach to address the challenges resulting from the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) that couples multi-disciplinary internal research with extramural research and collaborative ventures.

ARL intends to establish a new collaborative venture (the IoBT CRA) that seeks to develop the foundations of IoBT in the context of future Army operations.

The Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) will consist of private sector and government researchers working jointly to solve complex problems.

The overall objective is to develop the fundamental understanding of dynamically-composable, adaptive, goal-driven IoBTs to enable predictive analytics for intelligent command and control and battlefield services.

The Future Army will operate in a highly complex and rapidly changing environment, thus the U. S. Army’s Operating Concept is to “Win in a Complex World”.

The Army must tackle wicked problems wherein objectives and constraints evolve in unpredictable ways.

Complexity arises from the increasing heterogeneity, connectivity, scale, dynamics, functionality and interdependence of networked elements, and from the increasing velocity and momentum of human interactions and information.

Events now unfold in internet time, as noted by the Defense Science Board (DSB) 2014 Study on Decisive Army Strategic and Expeditionary Maneuver.

In this context, future IoBTs will be significantly more complex that today’s networked systems, and novel mathematical approaches and techniques will be needed to represent them, reason about them, understand their behaviors, and to provide predictive analytics in diverse and dynamic environments.

The Army will use IoTs for diverse and dynamic missions and will require rapid deployment and adaptation in environments with high mobility, resource constraints, and extreme heterogeneity in both very dense and sparse environments.

In addition to Things and IoTs that the Army owns and controls, it may also need to make use of IoTs that it does not own or fully control.

A foundational problem to be addressed by the CRA is the fundamental understanding of how to learn and devise complex models of IoBT goals, networks, information, and analytics to enable intelligent command and control, and battlefield services.

A critical issue embedded throughout all aspects of IoBTs is cyber physical security as the Army will need to use things it does not control (military (blue), adversary (red), civilian (gray)), accommodate deceptive data, and counter advanced persistent threats.

ARL strongly believes that a joint collaborative approach by multidisciplinary researchers is required to make fundamental advances towards meeting the CRA goal to develop a fundamental understanding of IoBTs.

ARL has identified three interrelated Research Areas (RAs) that when jointly studied will advance the theoretical foundations of IoBTs in the context of future Army operations.

• Discovery, Composition and Adaptation of Goal-Driven Heterogeneous IoBTs • Autonomic IoBTs to Enable Intelligent Services • Distributed Asynchronous Processing and Analytics of Things In addition to these three RAs, Cyber-Physical Security has been identified as a Cross-Cutting Research Issue (CCRI) that is inherent in each of the RAs and that must be jointly studied with the RAs to make fundamental advances in IoBTs.

The CRA is intended to create a collaborative environment that enables the Alliance to advance the state-of-the-art and to take advantage of the diverse scientific capabilities and viewpoints of both the private sector and government researchers.

The CRA will work collaboratively with ARLs Enterprise research programs to identify areas where joint, multi-disciplinary, collaborative research is advantageous.

Continuous collaboration, technical exchanges, site visits, and staff rotations will strengthen and improve the CRA research and its Army relevance.