SBIR-STTR Award

Multi-mission naval combat requires precise, timely collaboration between forces to achieve the commanders intent. Course of action analysis is complicated by the range of adversarial capabilities, potential countermeasures, and their impact on friendly mission objectives. Current tools are largely two-dimensional representations with limited capabilities for multi-unit or multi-domain. Further, no battle management aids or mission planning tools exist that support collaborative processes, or provide a unified view into the disparate data stores across domains and missions. To address this challenge, Aptima, Inc., and our partner, Promethean Blue, propose to develop the 5D Intelligent Visualization (5D-IVIS) tool, a web-based, five-dimensional course of action analysis tool supporting battle management and mission planning for AEGIS weapons system commanders. 5D-IVIS integrates traditional three-dimensional geospatial visualizations with bi-directional temporal manipulation and video game-inspired uncertainty visualizations to enable dynamic decision-making. Data will be fused into a common, temporally oriented datastore to enable rapid access and exploration. We believe that 5D-IVIS will improve commanders decision-making abilities in multi-mission naval warfare by reducing uncertainty about options and eliminating information barriers that inhibit collaboration.

Benefit:
We anticipate that 5D-IVIS will provide several benefits to the Navy and other operational communities analyzing courses of action across diverse domains and missions, including: - 5D-IVIS will develop novel visualizations to intuitively depict uncertainty, threat, opportunity and allow Commanders to view how these impact courses of action (COA) options forwards and backwards in time. By applying proven visualizations for decision-support tools and combining them with common UI presentation (fog of war, waypoints, etc.) and interaction found in competitive strategy games to the Navy COA domain, Commanders will be able to quickly assess and refine COAs resulting in prompt decision-making, effective coordination and decision superiority without a difficult learning curve. - 5D-IVIS will increase collaboration across multi-domain COA analysts by providing tools to interact remotely through a web-based interface, or collaboratively in a localized team setting through multi-user, multi-modal control. The tool will aggregate data from disparate systems and merge them into a cohesive whole, displayed to distributed or local users in a 5D (3D + Time + Uncertainty) visualization tool. - 5D-IVIS will reduce Navy lifecycles costs through the following three methods: 1) implementing a modular and purely web-based front-end, reducing the complexity of RMF compliance and increasing the likelihood of future tools integrating with 5D-IVIS; 2) reducing or eliminating training necessary to use 5D-IVIS through industry-proven human-centered design of intuitive displays and user interfaces and by incorporating SME feedback early and often into the design and development of the UI; 3) providing a flexible API which future Navy software can integrate with for long term cost reduction. 5D-IVIS will adhere to Navy standards (CANES, ACS, MTC2) and will supply the necessary endpoints to ingest any relevant data into our 3D visualizer. See Task 4 for more detail. These benefits may also be valuable to other use cases in the DoD and a variety of commercial sectors. The fast growing gaming industry could popularize more sophisticated combat scenarios. 5D-IVIS technology may also be applicable to a variety of traffic control use cases including maritime, air and space. Once 5D-IVIS is developed and fielded, it would have high value at all major Navy training commands that provide tactical, staff, and operational planning to the Fleet. Examples include SWOS (Surface Warfare Officer School) Tactical Action Officer curriculum, NSMWDC (Naval Surface and Mine Warfare Development Center) Weapons Tactics Instructors (WTI) courses of instruction, TACTRAGRU LANT/PAC (Tactical Training Group, Atlantic/Pacific) for use in Strike Group training and certification, and other tactics and staff planning courses throughout the Fleet.

Keywords:
Temporal data, Temporal data, decision support tool, high-dimensional visualization, Situation Awareness, Course of Action, Decision-making, WebGL, Command and Control

Decision superiority can be the difference between successful and disastrous Naval mission execution. The Navy seeks an automated Course of Action (COA) capability that improves situational understanding through the use of visualization. New approaches are needed that have enhanced visualization methods and present dynamic real-time, temporally accurate visualizations of friendly and threat capabilities within a region of interest. Initially designed to enable rapid, accurate planning of multi-domain operations for Aegis-enabled Navy units, 5D-IVIS leverages a three-dimensional (3D) planning interface supporting rapid, intuitive sketching, refinement, and annotation of multi-domain COAs. Next, the systems unified temporal visual analytics link disparate courses of action into a common spatiotemporal frame of reference. This enables rapid identification of key decision points such as branches and sequels. Finally, 5D-IVISs data fusion architectures provide commanders with an efficient comparison of assessment criteria of predicted red-force activities, including executability, supportability, and risk. When completed, 5D-IVIS will be a powerful decision-making tool that supports next-generation mission planning with increased speed and certainty, while demanding low overall training and operation costs.

Benefit:
5D-IVIS will enhance the Navys automated COA capabilities and decision making for collaborative, coordinated mission planning. Our solution improves situational understanding through dynamic, temporal visualizations including mission/contingency plans, environmental factors, expected risks, and uncertainty. The 5D-IVIS visualizations will yield more comprehensible mission plans and lead to better, more timely decisions for complex mission planning in military and commercial environments with dynamic risk profiles and multiple assets.

Keywords:
Multi-domain planning, Temporal Data Visualization, decision support., IAMD, Multi-mission planning, Visualization, COA planning, mission planning