Metamodeling NATO Operation Orders: a proof-of-concept to deal with digitalization of the battlefield

Digitalization of the whole society changes the way Systems-of-Systems have to be considered. Remaining independently operated and managed, SoS increase their collaboration skills using shared or cooperated information systems. People can be seen as particular digital sub-systems due to smart equipments they can use. Military operations, which are considered as typical SoS, are no exception to this fact. New operational doctrines have to be created to take advantage of those new capabilities. In this paper, we propose to develop methods and tools inspired by software engineering to create new automated capabilities in battlefield engineering. More precisely, we explain the direction which should be considered in the area of battlefield engineering in order to deal with those new capabilities. Inspired from Model-Based Engineering, we realized a proof-of-concept showing how to change textual operation orders with graphical ones. The latter can be exported in a common standardized format, that enables digital interpretation. We present the OPORD-ML language which is based on a metamodel inspired from a NATO operation order standard. It is supported by an automatically generated tool.