Objectivity, Inc. Case Study: L3 Communications

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L-3 Integrates US Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) and the US Air Force's Network Centric Collaborative Targeting (NCCT) Systems

The Objectivity/DB platform reduces the time it takes to accurately locate targets by more than 90%

Objectivity/DB is the integration platform that L-3 is using for the U.S. Air Force's Network Centric Collaborative Targeting (NCCT) system and the U.S. Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) system. Objectivity/DB is the real-time and scalable "data fusion" repository that monitors, analyzes, responds and reports on all platforms and assets such as aircraft, etc., uniquely satisfying the real time data management requirements for the NCCT system. This integration program is part of the U.S. Navy's Trident Warrior exercise series, involving an Expeditionary Strike Group, U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army aircraft, as well as coalition aircraft.

Network-centric Warfare System

The U.S. Air Force's NCCT is an open network-centric architecture and software design that horizontally integrates airborne and ground assets to detect, locate, track and target ground targets. Through machine-to-machine exchanges, NCCT supports time-sensitive and prioritized targeting operations more efficiently, accurately and quickly. CEC is the U.S. Navy's premier network-centric warfare system, which shares radar data between participants to precisely track airborne targets, providing combat identification on airborne tracks and engagement-quality information to all participants. CEC is fielded on several E-2 aircraft, cruisers, destroyers, amphibious ships and aircraft carriers.

Reducing Target Acquisition Time by 90%

The Objectivity/DB is at the heart of the NCCT Fusion Engine (NFE) supporting the NCCT application. Objectivity/DB is storing and managing vast amounts of disparate information performing data fusion from geospatial and sensor data from the NCCT sensor network. Objectivity/DB provides a reliable, scalable repository for the wide range of complex data types found in this type of mission-critical application. The Objectivity platform is highly optimized for performance and throughput in systems that handle highly interconnected data. Objectivity/DB's distributed processing system architecture, with no single point of failure, provides the robustness necessary for this application. Objectivity/DB handles all aspects of interoperability, including language, operating system, file system, networking and hardware dependencies.

As part of the NCCT concept, all participating platforms and ground stations cannot only exchange data, they can also collaborate to coherently collect and create new information that would otherwise go unreported by traditional "stove piped" platforms that do not easily share and disseminate information.

"By efficiently netting and synchronizing sensors in realtime and combining detections, it is possible to increase the probability of detecting and identifying a target, while also reducing the time it takes to accurately locate targets by more than 90%," according to Gary Davis, director of the NCCT program for L-3 ComCept. "This refined information updates a common, shared network Objectivity database so that the problem of multiple reports on a single target is dramatically reduced."

OBJECTIVITY/DB

Objectivity/DB © is the first commercial database that is scalable through the Exabyte-level. Objectivity/DB intrinsic features include its:

scalability
high availability
performance
interoperability

The Objectivity/DB platform is the leading high performance object database platform for sophisticated applications, with unrivaled support for heterogeneous computing environments. Objectivity/DB boosts developer productivity, shortens time-to-market, and provides the ideal platform for mission-critical applications requiring continuous performance and adaptability to future technologies. Objectivity/DB:

enables applications to analyze and correlate streaming event data and its complicated inter-relationships with known attributes
provides a clear real-time picture of known events, anomalies, and outcomes
analyzes in real time the complicated inter-relationships between data
provides real-time access to the complicated inter-relationships found between data that is housed in disparate databases within a single logical view

PRODUCTIVITY AND EASE-OF-USE

Objectivity/DB includes tools for enhanced productivity and ease-of-use including tight integration with the open source Eclipse IDE, support for XML, transparent interoperability for C++, Java, Smalltalk and SQL++/ODBC applications running on Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This BEA Ready release supports BEA WebLogic. It also has full Java Transaction API (JTA) integration allowing Objectivity/DB to serve as an EJB-managed transaction resource.

Objectivity/DB also includes a High Availability Option which offers developers superior fault tolerance that ensures data and business-critical application availability despite network or system failures. It provides fault isolation and improved transaction performance by replicating system services. Additionally, Objectivity/DB multiple site user data replication for continuous availability and improved performance provides a combination of data integrity and availability not offered by other replication solutions, making it the clear choice for distributed, scalable, mission-critical applications.

A rich set of administration tools provides complete control over the database. These include: dynamically sized objects, composite objects and objects related through dynamic bi-directional links. A sophisticated object clustering mechanism allows logically related objects to be physically grouped to minimize I/O and locking overhead.

Objectivity/DB also guarantees the ACID properties of databases: Objectivity/DB transactions are fully Atomic and transactions are serialized to ensure Consistency of data; both the Integrity and Durability of data are guaranteed.