How AFIT delivered NATO’s AGS BattleLab on a 31-month deadline with IBM DOORS Next

01 / 06 · AGS BattleLabAGS BattleLab: the test bed behind NATO ground surveillance

Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) gives NATO its own real-time picture of what happens on the ground. Five remotely piloted Global Hawk aircraft, based in Sigonella, Italy, watch for troop movements, unknown vessels near the coast and the effects of natural disasters.

The program is multinational and cost more than EUR 2 billion. Before the aircraft could fly operationally, the whole system had to be modeled, simulated and tested. That was the job of the AGS BattleLab.

02 / 06 · ChallengeChallenge: 31 months, 300 test cases, no slack

AFIT had 31 months to deliver the BattleLab test bed. Project documentation was expected to reach hundreds of thousands of pages, with more than 300 test cases to plan, run and report.

Every document had to meet NATO rules for standardization, security and reporting. As a Polish government entity, AFIT also had to meet state rules for the statement of work, methodology, security and reporting. And the first year of the schedule went to procurement.

03 / 06 · SolutionSolution: requirements, tests and changes in one platform

NATO already supplied its data in DOORS format, so the shortest path was to move AFIT from its existing DOORS installation to IBM DOORS Next and build the project on it.

On our recommendation, the team added two more tools from the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management platform:

• IBM DOORS Next for requirements, linked directly to the BattleLab database
• IBM Engineering Test Management for test planning, execution and verification
• IBM Engineering Workflow Management for change requests and configuration management

The setup covered what DO-178B/C, the guidance for developing and certifying airborne software, expects from a project: test output, integration testing, storage of verification results, configuration management and a change request process. The Polish government requirements were managed in DOORS Next as well.

With all project data in one place, the team could trace every test case back to a requirement and generate status reports on demand instead of assembling them by hand. Jarosław Sułkowski, who led C4ISR systems integration, called the requirements tool “a marvelous, very powerful tool” because it removed ambiguity between the people who owned the requirements and the people who owned the acceptance criteria.

04 / 06 · ResultsResults: on time, 20% fewer requirement defects

• On schedule: all four phases delivered in 31 months, including an end-to-end test at the main operating base in Italy
• 20% fewer defects in program requirements
• Design work, started as soon as the requirements were in DOORS Next, finished one month before the critical design review
• Data collection and status reporting automated, with reports generated on demand
• At handover to the AGS forces, NATO said it was very satisfied; AFIT then ran AGS familiarization training for NATO

05 / 06About AFIT

The Air Force Institute of Technology is a research institute founded in 1953 and supervised by the Polish Minister of National Defense. Its teams work on aircraft design and integration, unmanned aerial vehicles, avionics, logistics and C4ISR systems integration.

Source: IBM case study: Air Force Institute of Technology, May 2024.

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