Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 1: Concepts and Solutions for Communications and Information Systems
45
The specific objectives of the MOSA program were to:
• Reduce whole life cost as current combat systems and delivery and sustainment
approaches are increasingly unaffordable;
• Deliver combat agility to provide new capabilities and counter new threats
and to do so rapidly;
• Deliver acquisition agility to exploit a broader industrial supply base, avoid
vendor lock-in and field new technologies as they become available;
• Sustain capability through platform life, including countering technological
obsolescence and enabling platform life extension;
• Exploit the opportunities offered by COTS, modularity and openness;
• Foster a common understanding and industrial openness to the benefit
of the MOD in performing its mission and also to benefit industry.
The MOSA architecture was developed by a consortium of seven industry
companies which are major UK combat system experts. The architecting process,
illustrated in Fig. 1, is generic and can be applied to systems in other domains with different
functional and non-functional requirements. It describes the process that yielded
a complete architectural description of the functionality of multiple applications,
software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure, using suitable open standards.
From the functional decomposition of the system, the key interfaces were defined.
Figure 1. MOSA Architecting Process
MOSA has provided the following benefits to the MOD:
• Improved maintenance through component and interface commonality;
• Cheaper and quicker updates and technology insertion through modular
decoupled design;
• Increased re-use of software, potential for reduced duplication;