Global interoperability without global consensus, a DARPA solution via the STITCHES toolchain (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Interoperability between systems is normally created through highly coupled interfaces and exchanges hardcoded into multiple systems' core software. Open architecture standards attempt to solve interoperability by a common programming interface but these open architectures suffer from the same manual programming need when interfacing with systems outside of the same open architecture standard and often between different versions of the same standard. The drive to a common standard can work for stable technology but military systems are constantly upgrading to new global and regional threats and are continually diverging away from standard practices. The STITCHES toolchain provides two overarching and automatically generated functions: translation of messages and control of data flow. STITCHES' translation function is created by a novel use of graph and category theory via a graph-based data base where messages are transformed to other semantically equivalent messages and the STITCHES compiler translates between two system messages by traversing the graph then optimizing the final transform. Data flow control is achieved by implementing routing functions, data synchronization, source and destination isolation, and several other types of data control via both stateless and statefull transports. Both of these STITCHES functions are implemented by a custom domain specific language tailored to interoperability. The result is large and small system of systems implemented on the scale of minutes to hours vs months to years which has been routinely demonstrated within the DARPA SoSITE program.