An Air Force collaborative enterprise environment

A collaborative enterprise environment is an application of advanced distributed simulation and information technology in an integrated environment to support technology development, system design, performance, cost, and producibility trade-off analyses throughout the entire product and system engineering life cycle. The Sensors and Information Directorates, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have initiated a major effort to implement a Collaborative Environment (CE) to provide the framework and development methodology required for affordable and timely technology for the 21/sup st/ Century warfighter. This paper discusses AFRL's efforts to support the new Air Force vision and to maximize its internal business processes through enterprise-wide cooperation. The paper discusses the need for a CE as a result of Acquisition Reform and Simulation-based Acquisition; describes CE and how the framework supports enterprise-wide collaboration of multidisciplinary expertise; and describes a CE technical architecture and the new technologies that distinguish it from conventional distributed processing systems.