BAE Systems adds LEXI intel software into DCGS solution

Programme engineers at BAE Systems are integrating the company’s main, end user software interface application for intelligence data into its offering for the army’s latest version of the Distributed Common Ground Sensor-Army (DCGS-A) battlefield management system.

The Lead Exploitation Intelligence (LEXI) software, when teamed with the company’s Intelligence Knowledge Environment (IKE) software framework, will provide army intelligence analysts with a level of flexibility in accessing and evaluating data from disparate sources not seen in previous DGCS-A variants, BAE Systems Senior Executive Jeff Bongianino said. That flexibility is rooted in the LEXI system’s commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) design and open-source architecture, he said on 27 July.

“At the end of the day, it is an open platform . . .[and] that really allows us to bring in anybody’s COTS products to the table,” he said. “Let’s say you’re working for the army and you want to use Oracle as the database, for instance . . . and then the air force wants, let’s say IBM. The platform we are providing under LEXI allows for that plug and play” capability, with very minimal integration time, due to the open architecture construct the system is based on, Bongianino said.

Capable of operating on either a cloud-based or fixed server network, the commercially-based LEXI interface application leveraged embedded fusion algorithms that can “associate geospatial intelligence, signals intelligence, publicly available information, and other reporting” coming into DCGS-A to track enemy and friendly forces in a given area of responsibility, according to a company fact sheet. The system’s open-source architecture approach allows for rapid integration of new machine learning and artificial intelligence analytics packages, via LEXI’s open application planning interfaces, the fact sheet added.