THE CTEIP TEST AND TRAINING ENABLING ARCHITECTURE, TENA, AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT IN REALIZING DOD TEST AND TRAINING RANGE INTEROPERABILITY

Abstract

While military asset testing and training might be seen as complementary in supporting military prepareness, they cannot complement each other without an effective and efficient method of distributing data laterally across geographically separated data gathering, analysis, and display systems. This cost-effective integration of range data and telemetry resources is critical to ensuring the war worthiness of today’s advanced weapon systems such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the sensor and weapon platforms such as the highly sophisticated unmanned vehicles that are beginning to populate the air, land, and sea areas of operations. To ensure the advantages of range interoperability are available across the DoD Test and Training ranges, a Central Test and Evaluation Program (CTEIP) project has developed and is refining the Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA). The core of TENA is the TENA Common Infrastructure, including the TENA Middleware and TENA Repository. The TENA Middleware is the high-performance, real-time, low-latency communication infrastructure used by range instrumentation software and tools during execution of a range event. The TENA Object Model enables semantic interoperability among range resource applications by encoding the information to be communicated among those range applications. It may be seen as a range community-wide set of interface and protocol definitions encapsulated in an object-oriented design. The TENA tools, utilities, and gateways assist the user in creating and managing an integration of range resources, as well as in optimizing the TENA Common Infrastructure. TENA has proven to be a critical enabler of distributed live exercises to include the U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Millennium Challenge 2002, two major Joint National Training Capability exercises in 2004, Cope Thunder 04-02, and Joint Roving Sands/Red Flag 2005. TENA, as integral part of range data systems, has become an important component in the realization of range interoperability.