Getting more out of software U.S. Navy launches virtual library to help reuse code By Christopher P. Cavas Defense News October 16, 2006 The U.S. Navy owns the rights to a multitude of computer programs and systems for which it paid millions of dollars. The software, often developed for a specific project or program, might be useful in other applications, but the service, research groups and industry have no easy way to investigate the possibilities. The Navy could — and did — pay several times to develop similar software, a costly practice that can delay the fielding of new systems. Fixing that is the aim of a new online resource called SHARE, for Software Hardware Asset Reuse Enterprise. Although barely a handful of programs are currently online, the aim is to fill up the library with dozens of government-rights software programs that could be used for more than their original applications. “If one program in the Navy buys the rights, develops something, and you want to be able to re-use that application across other ships or platforms, we should only buy it once,” said Capt. James Shannon, the Open Architecture program manager for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) in Washington. “We don’t want people turning around and selling to us some new thing when 90 percent of it is government-owned and 10 percent is their investment.” A decade ago, nearly all computers and programs used by the Navy were proprietary — developed for a specific purpose. But the spread of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software resulted in an explosion of possibilities using systems developed by industry or elsewhere in the government. The Navy, Shannon said, needed to gain the kinds of efficiencies it began to realize in the mid-1990s with the Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion Sonar (ARCI) system developed by the submarine community. So Shannon and his team in December began creating a method to let concerned parties in on what the Navy and the government already own — and how the programs work. “We had a month to do it,” he said, but it soon became evident that figuring out what programs were owned by the government was harder than first thought. “It took us several months to figure out what was truly proprietary and what wasn’t,” Shannon said, noting that some government-owned software had company copyrights. “We had the companies remove the copyright markings and then put the documents into the library.” SHARE went online in August, although Shannon admits the “shelves” of his new library remain thinly stocked. “We’ve got to keep adding more stuff to it,” he said. Only two programs were available at first: portions of the Aegis combat system software and the Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS). The library contains classified and unclassified material. “If it’s unclassified, you can get the information without having to go through a [NAVSEA] program office,” Shannon said. “Classified requests still need to go through a program office.” Although the site has been online only a few weeks, “it’s useful already,” he said. “Everybody wants access to the Aegis code, the SSDS. Those are the architectures for our surface platforms. The return on investment is immediately good.” An intended byproduct is to open up competition, Shannon emphasized. “By introducing more business models and introducing transparency into the process, we’re hoping that we’re going to get greater innovation, greater understanding of challenges, more competition and through more competition, perhaps greater affordability,” he said. “Then the market determines what the cost is as opposed to a single company.” The Aegis combat system has faced significant challenges to convert the formerly proprietary system — first developed by Lockheed Martin in the 1970s — to an open architecture (OA) environment. To date, about two-thirds of the system has gone OA, said Rick Scharadin, the OA senior manager with Lockheed Martin’s Maritime Systems and Sensors group, Moorestown, N.J. He noted that the command and decision (C&D) portion of the Aegis system, once converted to COTS systems, was a big factor in the systems developed for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and the U.S. Coast Guard Deepwater program’s National Security Cutter. “We reused 98 percent of our open C&D for our LCS C2 [command and control] solution, so the Aegis C2 and the LCS C2 are basically the same core command and control structures on both,” Scharadin said. “We took 75 percent of the original C2 and used that on the Deepwater National Security Cutter. So we have the same core C2 system on Deepwater, LCS and Aegis cruisers.” Scharadin and other Lockheed managers like what the Navy is doing with the SHARE program, but want to see a better way for small businesses to understand what it is they’re getting access to. “You’ll probably have less involvement by small businesses because they can’t afford to take a large piece of software and then try to figure out what it does, to help,” said Rich Lockwood, director of Lockheed’s Command and Combat Management Systems. “You may get some of the larger corporations that will be able to do that. But the smaller ones don’t have the resources to do that.” General Dynamics, Lockheed’s primary competitor in the LCS program, has a method it claims could solve that problem. “The approach we came up with is a common data model strategy that leveraged some of the state-of-the-art modeling tools like UML [Unified Modeling Language],” said Dan Hogan, General Dynamics’ LCS research and development program manager in Pittsfield, Mass. “Document the data exchange necessary. Automate the software integration.” The modeling approach, Hogan explained, presents information in graphic form and has been in use in the company’s LCS program for several years. “The approach allowed us to author the interfaces, share them with our suppliers and transfer them into software code to support integration,” he said. Applying a similar effort to the SHARE library should greatly increase access and understanding of the source codes and design documentation expected to fill its virtual shelves. “Once you’ve created a model, your support costs go down and your re-use availability goes up,” Hogan said. The COTS and open architecture approaches have been used from the beginning in the design of the DDG 1000/DD(X) Zumwalt-class destroyer, on which Raytheon is responsible for developing a Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE). “We treat our computing plan as a commodity,” said Bob Martin, Raytheon’s TSCE manager in Tewksbury, Mass. The open approach, he said, made efforts such as changing the operating system — a major effort on previous programs — a relatively easy process. “It’s really not a pain,” Martin said, noting that Raytheon competes the DDG 1000 operating system every four years and recently switched from Sun’s Solaris to IBM’s Blades. “We think it makes good sense, a good way to lower the cost and get more capability. The competition has been a very effective tool,” he said. DDG 1000 programs are among those the Navy plans to add to the SHARE library, Shannon said. He plans to expand the system from the surface ship community into aviation, submarines and communications. The Web site to register for access to SHARE is https://viewnet.nswc.navy.mil. A help desk with a toll-free telephone number is at 866-OA-REUSE (Archives)