Core Combat Architecture (COCOA)

To increase lethality and fully leverage advanced autonomous systems across the fleet, the U.S. Navy must improve ship combat effectiveness and efficiency by implementing an updated combat system capable of handling the complexity of today’s digital combat environment. To coordinate multiple platforms with diverse new sensor and weapons capabilities, the Navy needs a real-time distributed computing framework capable of supporting management of software modules, comprising a common core combat system (CCCS). The CCCS framework must: (1) Coordinate multiple platforms with various sensor and weapons capabilities, providing communications between capabilities hosted on a variety of platforms and distributed across multiple computing resources. (2) Monitor and manage multiple critical software applications with stringent real-time requirements, maintain process state information, and provide advanced fault detection. (3) Respond and adapt to new capabilities and battle conditions by implementing distributed fault recovery plans, enabling application modules to be added and removed dynamically as new capabilities come on line or move out of the battlespace. Adaptation may occur as automated responses as well as being subject to human supervision. (4) Incrementally incorporate legacy applications at a baseline level while supporting new software capability modules developed specifically for the new architecture, and operate on open computing platforms. Our solution to this problem, the Core Combat Architecture (COCOA), will deliver a CCCS framework that includes an application program interface (API) for software components, which provides real-time process scheduling, access to inter-module and inter-combat-system application data and communications services. COCOA will support upgrades within current and forthcoming AEGIS baselines by providing a platform-agnostic combat system core implementation for Future Surface Combatant (FSC) platforms.