Innovative Methods to Assess Technology Insertion Impact and Optimized Manning Navy SBIR FY2005.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2005.1 Topic No.: N05-047 Topic Title: Innovative Methods to Assess Technology Insertion Impact and Optimized Manning Proposal No.: N051-047-0950 Firm: The Sevaan Group LLC 411 North Lane Prince Frederick, Maryland 20678-5414 Contact: Niraj Srivastava Phone: (508) 364-4818 Abstract: The reduction in life-cycle costs for Naval vessels is critical for operating a cost efficient and robust Navy. Computer based simulations are an effective tool for human systems integration optimization, as well as for studying the risks associated with the complex interactions between crew and systems. The Sevaan Group will demonstrate the applicability of an innovative synthetic environment for driving optimal manning given a set of competing technologies, as well as provide better insight on how crew and technology interact and behave. The environment fuses traditional discrete event simulations for modeling deterministic technical naval systems with agent-based simulations to capture the behavior based upon cognitive and behavioral psychology. The modular environment empowers analysts to choose and integrate the best combination of available agent, discrete event, and physics based simulations to address the questions of manning. Naval researchers will benefit from the ability to study bottom-up crew conduct in addition to the traditional top-down, "cause and effect" approach. The environment embraces advances in complexity theory for simulating non-linear systems such as the interaction of crew to provide insight into emergent unforeseen behavior. Benefits: The Sevaan Group's synthetic environment will provide the Navy more robust and innovative capabilities for performing tradeoffs between technologies and crew impact. These capabilities are not specific to Naval environments and have a wider application to the Business Process Management (BPM) industry. BPM technology automates business processes end-to-end by integrating people and applications across the enterprise, including external entities, based on business rules deployed in a runtime execution engine. The BMP market sizing is estimated at over one billion annually and is expected to grow to nearly three billion by 2008. Historically BPM vendors largely had to rely on discrete event simulations for their modeling capabilities. The Sevaan Group is working with IT industry leaders to enhance their BPM offerings with novel simulation solutions. Return