Douglas Gregory Consulting LLC, founded in 2017, offers full-spectrum consulting services in Open Architecture (OA) for U.S. Department of Defense cyber physical systems, including Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS), vehicular electronics (vetronics) and weapon systems.

The company’s current portfolio of OA activities includes:

• Architecture Concepts WG lead for the Army’s Autonomous Ground Vehicle Reference Architecture (AGVRA).
• Founding chair of the Department of Defense Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Control Segment (UCS) Working Group, currently the SAE Unmanned Systems (UxS) Control Segment (UCS) Committee (SAE AS-4UCS).
• Founding chair of the SAE Family of Dictionaries project (SAE AS-4UCS-3).
• Developer/tutor for NAVAIR’s Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) Leadership Course.
• Strategy development for NAVAIR’s OA Test and Evaluation (T&E) approach.

Architectural realms

OA serves the strategic goals of the Enterprise. It frames the Enterprise’s social structure, business model, how business functions are to be realized, and conformance. All too often, the scope of OA is limited to system engineering concerns, which can lead to initial tactical success, but long-term strategic failure.

At Douglas Gregory Consulting, the emphasis is on complete OA solutions.

Strategy

The design of OA is not the same as system engineering. It is the alignment of system engineering concerns with the business concerns of the Enterprise stakeholders. Often OA business transactions follow different pathways to the system engineering business transactions. In many cases, there is no single entity in control of the OA.

Governance

The primary view of OA is the governance model, which defines the ownership of other architecture views, and the required workflows and transactions across ownership boundaries. Often the governance view must be negotiated and renegotiated throughout the OA lifecycle.

Management

OA is a mix of consensus standards and the market-based activities of the participants in the Enterprise.  The principal role of management in OA is ensure that the actions and joint actions of participants are consistent with the strategy and governance model, and take corrective action as required.

Architecture Design

OA must address three engineering layers: the enterprise layer, the product portfolio layer, and the project system layer. Each of these layers has its own stakeholders, concerns and governance/management. Across these engineering layers there are four strategic views: the information strategic view, the functional strategic view, the technology strategic view, and the business strategic view.

The information strategic view is concerned information and information exchange, which tends to be standards based. The principal openness attribute of this strategic view is interoperability. The functional strategic view is concerned with operational capability that is realized in software applications, which tend to be market based. The principal openness attribute of this strategic view is reusability. The technology strategic view supports the functional strategic view. Its principal openness attribute is portability and tends to be standards based.

Finally, the business strategic view is concerned with the division of business resources (labor and capital) to realize the OA goals of each engineering layer. Its principal openness attribute is competitiveness.

Business Model

No technical solution will succeed if it does not align with the business goals of the participants in the Enterprise. A common problem during the material solution analysis phase is to validate the operational aspects of an OA but not the business aspects. Stakeholder management is key to OA, where no stakeholder concerns are ‘off the table’.

Education

OA is a new discipline that is rapidly evolving. Whereas system engineering integrates diverse technical disciplines, OA goes further and integrates system engineering with business models, interlocking industrial systems, and geopolitical objectives. A potential barrier to OA adoption is lack of knowledge of the topic and no common understanding between stakeholders.