Digital Ship and Naval Combat Cloud

The outcome should contribute to:

• Accelerate the battle rhythm of naval operations based on real time exchange of data and synchronised collaboration between naval assets.
• Optimise data communication requirements (e.g., protocol, bandwidth, latency, throughput).
• The commonality of EU Member States’ and EDF Associated Countries’ naval systems by proposing a common digital ship architecture, a comprehensive portfolio of related standards, services and products, and a naval combat cloud environment.
• Increase interoperability and interchangeability among EU Member States’ and EDF Associated Countries’ naval industries and EU Member States and EDF Associated Countries.
• Reduce the costs linked to the development of future systems, their upgrade, looking for continuous/regular capability updates, and their in-service support throughout their life cycle.
• Strengthen the European naval capability landscape and promote EU’s strategic autonomy in the naval sector

It is difficult for the armed forces to keep pace with the speed of the development of digital technologies on the civilian market. However, the rapid integration of more powerful devices and applications into naval units is key to provide naval forces with the capabilities needed to successfully conduct their missions.

The adoption of a common ship digital architecture for naval units allows the operation of different systems of the ship (SOTS), either on-board or off-board, and is key to provide the required flexibility to quickly incorporate new SOTS or improvements or upgrade key functions where needed and thus should alleviate the aforementioned problem. This also aims to maximise the interoperability between SOTS and the integration of collaborative capabilities.

This approach should improve:

• The speed in the observe–orient–decide–act (OODA) loop, mission performance, and operational readiness while training on real data.
• Level of anticipation by predictive/prescriptive capabilities for operations.
• SOTS availability and reliability, including safety and ship survivability and resilience.
• Training, automation, and in-service support.
• The cost associated to the whole life cycle of the ship.

Specific objective

The specific objective is:

• To design, prototype and test a digital platform as an EU-based infrastructure framework (i.e., digital platform) for the integration and common operation of the SOTS.
• To launch the initial design of a multidomain naval combat cloud which could cover the gap between the cloud at naval platform level and the global and joint inter-services combat cloud.

The multidomain naval combat cloud should combine and federate services provided by or distributed in different naval units, to allow for an effective and efficient collaboration between the different platforms and assets involved in a naval combat scenario, including surface, sub-surface, and air assets. The possibility to work in cooperation should increase and extend the operational capabilities of the platforms.

The proposal should consider the use of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) as a key enabler of a common and overarching engineering environment tool. Such a design approach should provide a realistic testing environment for the continuous integration of evolving digital technologies (e.g., processing, data storage capacities, fog-/edge-computing, Internet of Things (IoT)) to ensure the openness and scalability of the digital architecture.

The proposal should specifically address cybersecurity aspects. It should consider new trends in cybersecurity such as the Data Centric/Dynamic Zero-Trust Security, or any other evolution in cyber warfare that may be applicable during the execution.

This call topic contributes to the STEP objectives, as defined in STEP Regulation, in the target investment area of deep and digital technologies.

This topic aims to:

• Define the set of common services required to support to the SOTS.
• Design in detail the ship digital architecture to provide the main services (e.g., operational environment, connectivity, data and models management) for the functional integration of SOTS.
• Identify the required standards (including hardening standards) so the SOTS can be integrated seamlessly.
• Build a prototype for functional integration of SOTS and functional performance of a EU based naval combat cloud.
• Test that prototype, including various systems of the ship as representatives use cases to utilise the infrastructure as the supporting operational environment.
• Initiate the design of an EU based multidomain naval combat cloud.

Types of activities

The following types of activities are eligible for this topic:

Accordingly, the proposals must cover at least the following tasks as part of mandatory activities:

• Studies
  • • Identify and analyse the systems implemented across the EU navies to be integrated in the digital platform.
    • Analyse the standards required to put in place the digital platform.
    • Define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure the efficiency of the digital platform in providing services to the supported SOTS.
    • Establish the building blocks for a multidomain naval combat cloud.
    • Review the state-of-art as regards the digital platform and system digitalisation.
    • Review the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) of the digital ship under the direction of the participating Navies.
• Design
  • • Design in detail the system architecture.
    • Initiate the design of a multidomain naval combat cloud.
• System prototyping
  • • Produce a prototype of the digital platform while implementing the digital architecture compatible with the multidomain naval combat cloud functionalities.
• Testing
  • • Perform extensive testing on the prototype to validate the proposed solution and extract conclusions for a future system implementation.

The above-mentioned studies, design, prototyping, and testing activities related to cloud based digital platforms must only be based on cloud service providers both established in the EU Member States or EDF Associated Countries and owned and controlled by EU Member States or EDF Associated Countries or entities.

The proposals should substantiate synergies and avoid unnecessary duplication with foreseen, ongoing or completed activities under EDIDP and EDF, in particular but not limited to those related to the topics EDF-2021-NAVAL-R-DSSDA (Digital ship and ship digital architecture), EDF-2021-NAVAL-R-SSHM (Ship Structural Health Monitoring), EDF-2021-DIGIT-D-MDOC (Military Multidomain Operations Cloud), EDF-2022-DA-NAVAL-NCS (Naval Collaborative Surveillance) and EDF-2024-DA-NAVAL-FNP (Functional smart system-of-systems under an integral survivability approach for future naval platforms).

Functional requirements

The digital architecture solutions should comply with the following functional objectives by design:

• Resilience: to identify architectural principles against undesirable events (e.g., combat damages resulting in decreased capabilities, loss of electrical power and chilled water supply, cyber-attack) that allow continual use of core functions or fast recovery in degraded mode.
• Security: to define and select common architectural principles, policies and interoperability components that maximise security against cyber and physical threats.
• Sustainability: to facilitate both the ability to maintain the operational availability of the architecture at reasonable costs (e.g., maintainability, obsolescence management) as well as the optimisation of resource-usage (e.g., lean architecture, energy optimisation). Furthermore, the architecture should facilitate the ability to evolve and integrate future technologies and architectural patterns as a key aspect of sustainability.
• Interoperability: to ensure interoperability/compatibility with other potentially cloud-based infrastructures in place (e.g., maritime as well as multidomain).

The digital platform implementing the digital architecture should additionally fulfil the following requirements:

• Follow an MBSE approach for the analysis, design, production, and testing.
• Provide a modular, interoperable, scalable, and flexible architecture that should be adaptable to the requirements of the end-users.
• Include several systems functionalities representative of the main SOTS, such as the Combat System, Platform Control System, Navigation and Bridge System, Communication System, Cyber-systems, or Digital Twin, among others.
• Allow the integration of new SOTS.
• Provide the services required by the SOTS including their potential requirements.
• Provide timely response to the services requested by the SOTS.
• Integrate the SOTS by using the adopted, hardened and/or developed standards.
• Consider the operational situation to optimise the performance of the ship.
• Consider how to apply trustworthy and efficient Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data techniques to the monitoring and detection of vulnerabilities.
• Be based on a cloud service provider based, owned and controlled in the EU or associated country.

The multidomain naval combat cloud should additionally fulfil the following requirements:

• Apply and merge domains involved in the naval combat to achieve a highly integrated network for communication, data capitalisation and resources sharing services.
• Combine real-time data and non-real-time data networks and synchronise information.
• Consider the application of big data analysis and its impact on cloud resources (e.g., computing power, storage) in the architecture options.
• Consider the development of custom trustworthy and efficient AI solutions to analyse information.
• Define the requirements for communication networks for data and control exchange within the naval scenario’s connectivity particularities.
• Provide a modular and scalable concept.
• Consider a decentralised approach with distributed computing power and allow for autarkic operations of single assets to ensure the continuity of operations in case of communication disconnections or interruptions.
• Allow to shift operations between different nodes in the cloud to make full usage of the available resources.
• Enable the prioritisation of the tasks according to military hierarchical levels.
• Guarantee protection of classified data.
• Optimise defensive and offensive courses of action by analysing the effects delivered by both kinetic and non-kinetic (e.g., cyber) effectors, while minimising associated collateral damages.
• Consider the development of custom trustworthy and efficient AI solutions to analyse information and support decision making.
• Be based on a cloud service provider based, owned and controlled in the EU or associated country.