TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Battlespace

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO-IWS) 5E

OBJECTIVE: This topic seeks to develop and deploy an innovative information processing capability that can provide Anti Submarine Warfare (ASW) operators with enhanced operational insights, alerts, advisories and recommendations based on deeper situational understanding inferred from not only traditional ("hard") data sources, but also non-traditional ("soft") information sources (that are currently being incorporated into the decision support process via other programs) which are beyond the typical contact and track data. The goal is to employ the automated situational understanding results to improve the timeliness and quality of the operator�s ability to identify valid detections and engage them beyond that provided by existing and planned decision support capabilities.

DESCRIPTION: The decision environment in which the Anti Submarine Warfare Commander (ASWC) must operate during threat prosecution is characterized by severe time pressure, complex, multi-component decision tasks, and rapidly evolving and changing information and situational state. Past and current work has focused on automatically simplifying and decluttering the user displays with an emphasis on processing and fusing sensor data. The next stage of innovation in extending the ASW decision support capabilities is to leverage information from additional sources, including sensor and track meta data (e.g., variance, frequency, behavior over time, etc.), codified (automated) narrative (e.g., HUMINT, chat, doctrine, rules of engagement, etc.), mission directives and objectives (e.g., operating area), data bases, and even prior situational assessment results[1,2]. Thus, the decision support products will result from processing information across time, geography, and source modality. Now that a more extensive set of hard and soft information is being made available to the decision support environment in a digital format, a set of situational assessment and understanding models and a modular, flexible processing framework to manage their construction (knowledge engineering) and execution (processing) are sought. The resulting solution must be able to be readily and unobtrusively integrated with the USW-DSS software framework.

PHASE I: Design a multi-modal situational understanding environment that can be applied to support ASW threat prosecution that improves the quality and effectiveness of users. A test case will be defined at program kickoff that will be used to demonstrate 1) the process for constructing a situational assessment and understanding model and 2) its usefulness in assisting ASW operators. Unclassified state data and operationally important features will be provided as GFI during Phase I. The key metrics to be used in evaluating the effectiveness of the approach will be reduction in the detect-to-engage timeline and improvement of detection quality.

PHASE II: Build an automated prototype that has a development environment for constructing and integrating situational assessment and understanding models and a runtime environment for executing them. It is expected that such a runtime environment will rely on a modern Service Oriented Architecture to facilitate integration with other Navy ASW systems.

PHASE III: Transition the automated situational assessment and understanding environment to USW Decision Support platforms.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: This situational assessment and understanding product should be able to add value to other complex decision support settings, such as mission planning, airspace/battlespace management and logistics. In addition to the US Military sector, potential users include other federal and state governmental agencies (e.g., FAA, DOT, DHS) and industry (e.g., transportation and logistics companies). Adherence to a modular, Service Oriented Architecture should enhance the portability of the work products to these other sectors.

REFERENCES:
1. D. Hall, and J. Jordan, Human-Centered Information Fusion, Artech House. 2010.

2. J. Holsopple, M. Sudit, et al, "Enhancing Situation Awareness via Automated Situation Assessment," IEEE Communications Magazine, pp 146 � 152, March 2010.

KEYWORDS: Situational Assessment; Perception; Understanding; Decision Support; Anti Submarine Warfare; Knowledge Engineering; Service Oriented Architecture; Battlespace Management

Questions may also be submitted through DoD SBIR/STTR SITIS website.