Cross-Organization Service Use Management for SSA

CONFERENCE PAPER With the Joint Space Operations Center Mission Systems (JMS) focus to deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment, the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) community is moving rapidly toward a platform environment. Organizations will no longer rely entirely on systems within their boundaries. Instead, services and data are shared across organizational boundaries between diverse organizations. For SSA to succeed, JMS and similar efforts must employ and share resources across organizational boundaries (from AFSPC, to other US partners, to non-US partners and even universities). However, sharing services across organizational boundaries presents visibility and dependency issues. What information does an organization need to rely on these external services for mission critical needs? This paper presents an approach to dynamic service use agreement (SUA) negotiation that provides service platforms (and SOAs) the ability to dynamically negotiate the use of services across organizational boundaries. Using a small set of common service level agreement metadata (SLA metadata) parameters, service use can automatically be negotiated between SOAs. The Managing Aggregated Services (MASS) toolkit is designed to enable automated SUA across organizational boundaries by standardizing the service use parameters (the SLA metadata) as the foundation for SUA. The MASS toolkit demonstrates that this SUA can be done between systems as the SLA metadata provides the necessary visibility for the consuming organization into the provider organization services. The MASS toolkit also answers the question “who is using my service?” Service access can be limited to only SOAs which have negotiated an SUA, providing information security for service providers. In the highly dynamic SSA environment, where services will be provided by a variety of organizations, previous work has shown that SOA can shorten service integration from months to weeks. MASS demonstrates the potential to move this integration to days and hours by removing the need to negotiate the technical parameters of a service level agreement for each new service interaction by hand.