Smart Mission Planning Wizard: A Rethink Toward Automation
Navy SBIR FY2014.1


Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2014.1
Topic No.: N141-019
Topic Title: Smart Mission Planning Wizard: A Rethink Toward Automation
Proposal No.: N141-019-0151
Firm: Architecture Technology Corporation
9971 Valley View Road
Eden Prairie, Minnesota 55344-3526
Contact: Ryan Marotz
Phone: (952) 829-5864
Web Site: www.atcorp.com
Abstract: Mission planning is a labor and time intensive process. The complexity of the tasks and the amount of work involved require considerable training and proficiency. Such challenges represent a hurdle to mission planners especially when only minor last minute changes need to be made to a mission plan. Usually an extensive amount of work needs to be redone to account for the minor changes. The complexity and difficulty of mission planning can be attributed largely to the following factors: 1) Heavily manual and repetitive tasks, 2) lack of software intelligence that is able to capture the essence of a mission plan and connect the dots together, 3) complex user interfaces, and 4) lack of visualization tools that help mission planners better understand the different stages of a mission plan. Architecture Technology Corporation proposes an innovative solution: a simplified mission planning wizard called SMART (Smart Mission planning wizard: A Rethink Toward automation). SMART is a mission-development and management system that facilitates mission planning through automation, real time feedback, and visualization. SMART assists its users in building and validating mission plans quickly and efficiently.
Benefits: SMART is potentially applicable to any logistics planning and management product. An intelligent automated mission planning and management system with visualization capability has many potential and broad applicability to the commercial airline community as a mean of evaluating and assessing routing changes and flight planning modifications. The automated features, streamlined design features, and the ability to play the visualization with real-time feedback facilitate mission planning dramatically. The mission management and visualization tools to be developed will be of considerable interest to private sector businesses as well as several government agencies. The largest non-military market for SMART, in our estimation, is the field service management market. There may also be a need for SMART mission planning functionality for first responder/emergency response and disaster relief. ATC will concentrate its commercialization work first on acceptance and deployment of SMART in the Navy, and secondarily on its adoption in other governmental and commercial markets.

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