Systematic’s interoperability experts have today begun the final preparations for Exercise FLANDRES.

Exercise FLANDRES will test the effectiveness of a UK brigade working with a French brigade as part of a French division. The exercise will demonstrate the interoperability currently achievable and will undoubtedly inform work leading towards the establishment of a Combined Joint Expeditionary Force envisaged in the agreement between Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, and French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, in November 2010.

“Systematic’s specialists have been working with us as we prepare for Exercise FLANDRES, which takes place in June 2011. They have provided expert advice on how British Forces using BCIP might interoperate with the French SICF command and control system,” says Lt Col Martin Bever, British liaison officer (Digitisation) France.

“Their in-depth knowledge of interoperability has been
critical in our planning in order to reduce risk of failure, and we will be using Systematic’s C2 software during the actual exercise to create a multilateral interoperability programme (MIP) gateway which will allow the UK and French systems to exchange operational data.”

Technical preparation for the exercise began in September last year. A round of field testing took place in December and, today, the final phase of field testing began in Mourmelon-le-Grand, France.

Systematic’s SitaWare products will sit at the very heart of the exercise to provide an MIP gateway between Britain’s ComBAT command and control application and the French command and control system.

Meanwhile, Systematic’s IRIS products will be used to support the exchange of NATO and national formatted messages between the two headquarters’ staffs.

The integration services team from Systematic have also joined the MIP and messaging environments and this round of testing will prove the integration of logistics information from ComBAT messages with the MIP gateway for automatic exchange with the French system.