THESIS BRIEF 

The following PhD thesis faces the problem of command and control systems, particularly those related to C4ISR systems. C4ISR systems (Command Control, Computers and Communications Information Surveillance and Reconaissance) cover a huge range of architectures and computers and communications systems. Their main goal, both at the civil and the military domains, is to gather data about the status of the operations theatre in order to deliver that information, properly formatted, to the commanders on charge of an operation to help them making an adequate vision of what is going on, allowing a proper decision-making process. On the other hand, it must serve as a communications platform in order to deliver orders or whatever information commanders find suitable.

This PhD thesis focuses on identifying current needs at the tactical command and control field, both in the civil and military approaches, and proposes a global architecture for C4ISR systems that lets the design, development and implementation of a solution for small units command and control system (from battalion level and below) to enhance situational awareness, both shared and individual, of commanders on duty at those levels. It has been enforced the usage of architectures and the development of systems that follow the state-of-the-art command and control concepts detected at the scientific literature review, in order to obtain effectiveness in the accomplishment of a mission, following the COTS (Commercial Off-The Shelf) philosophy, emphasizing the usage of standards in all components, both hardware and software, and using an OSS (Open Source Software) in the software components development, with an integration of multimedia flows as current’s work main contributions.

In order to achieve those results, a deep and exhaustive analysis of the state of the art of command and control systems has been done, from its beginnings up to latest proposals. That analysis has led to the research, study and evaluation of the existent command and control approaches and architectures in the area of small units C4ISR systems, the one where this PhD thesis belongs to. On the other hand, being C4ISR systems complex elements that integrate several technological modules, an extensive and thorough state of the art of the technological components of a command and control system has been done. Those include Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and geolocation, real time systems, tactical communications systems, video coding and streaming systems, data replication in tactical environments, systems and protocols for interoperability and service oriented distributed architectures, among others.

An Overall architecture for small units command and control systems has been proposed. This architecture is composed of a network and a software architecture as main components and has constituted main scientific contribution of this PhD thesis.

Prototype implementations of the proposed architecture have been designed and implemented. Those implementations, being oriented to tactical domains, have been tested in realistic environments from the very first phases of development so prototypes are fully integrated in usage environments. Although it was not a starting-point goal of the thesis, we have to point out that some of the developed prototypes had become final systems, currently in usage by outstanding user agencies at the command and control community.

Finally, developed command and control systems have been validated and, as a consequence, proposed architecture. In order to achieve such validation, systems have been tested in completely realistic conditions, that is, in environments and scenarios of potential end users of a command and control system. Moreover, developed systems have been tested, evaluated and validated by the most relevant national and international certification agencies in the command and control community, certifying, as well, the validity of the architecture proposed, main contribution of the present thesis.