The Stability Model: An Interactive Framework for Measuring Robustness and Resiliency in Military Command and Control Systems

The increasing complexity and tight coupling between people and technology in military Command and Control (C2) systems has led to greater vulnerability due to system failure. Although system vulnerabilities cannot be completely eliminated, the accidental or anticipated failures have to be thoroughly understood and guarded. Traditionally, the failure in C2 systems has been studied with resiliency and the concept of self-healing systems represented with reactive models or robustness and the concept of self-protecting systems represented with proactive models. The authors propose the stability model for simultaneous consideration of robustness and resiliency in C2 systems. Robustness and resiliency are measured with multiple criteria (i.e. repair-recovery times and repair-recovery costs). The proposed interactive framework plots the robustness and resiliency measures in a Cartesian coordinate system and derives an overall stability index for various states of the C2 system based on the theory of displaced ideals. An ideal state is formed as a composite of the best performance values and a nadir state is formed as a composite of the worst performance values exhibited by the system. Proximity to each of these performance poles is measured with the Euclidean distance. The C2 system should be as close to the ideal state as possible and as far from the nadir state as possible. The stability index is a composite measure of distance from the ideal and nadir states in the C2 system. The authors present a case study at the Air Force Research Laboratory to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework and exhibit the efficacy of the procedures and algorithms.