Operations planning and execution for dynamic, cyber-physical networks

Network-Enabled Operations (NEO) describe a form of governance for the planning and execution of cyber-physical resources. Cyber-physical resources couple information and real-world services to meet operational objectives. Networks practicing NEO are capable of adopting new cyber-physical resources as they are brought into the network, discover their function, and intelligently make use of their capabilities in new ways.;NEO remains an untested proposition. The objectives of this praxis are twofold: one, to provide a reference implementation of NEO as a network governance philosophy for operations management and two, to characterize the use of NEO in an operational environment. The reference implementation presented here is called Phocis. It was tested using a network of cyber-physical resources in two statistical experiments. The cost and benefit of Phocis as an NEO governance solution was supported through experimental results.;The output of these experiments demonstrates the benefit of Phocis as it applies to NEO governance. A new metric, network agility, measured the response of networked resources to meet operational objectives under a changing environment. Networks that are able to interoperate under change are more agile. During experimentation, Phocis demonstrated a 17% increase in agility over the completion of the same missions by a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC).;Another metric, network bandwidth consumption, measured the cost of implementing NEO. For networks of cyber-physical resources, bandwidth is a constrained resource and serves to evaluate the cost of implementing NEO. Results show that the cost increased linearly with the number of nodes on the network. However, the benefit of NEO increased in a non-linear fashion. The difference between these two curves represents the value of NEO governance in dynamic operational settings.