ACV planners are provided poor tools for conducting all aspects of mission planning: paper checklists, lookup tables for load management and fuel settings, and a hard to use navigation system. ViPER-ACV provides a combined suite of planning data and services tailored to support the ACV crew. An AI driven load and fuel planning application that incorporates current lookup tables and adapts its models as actual craft performance is observed. An automated navigation planner that searches DNCs for key features, creating stay out areas and ingesting the operational plan overlays. A comms planner to validate comms lineup vs. Theater and Group requirements. And a 4D user interface to manage it all, allowing mission rehearsal, and post mission replay of downloaded craft data from the DTD. ViPER-ACV provides the crew a ruggedized tablet for use on the craft, incorporating all publications, and digitizing the checklists, operations and casualty procedures (OCP), and the planning capabilities above. With ViPER-ACV, the crew can conduct a rapid assessment of requested USMC Serials for feasibility of the load and fuel plan, integrate the mission plan and navigation plan to animate a mission rehearsal for briefing and crew prep, can integrate the downloaded DTD data from all craft to update craft performance models, and provide a post-mission debrief playback capability for crew training and lessons learned. The powerful addition of tablet-based plan management and publications will improve the efficiency of the crew in gathering reference information and decision-making, enabling the crew to spend less time conducting tedious administrative tasks, and more time focusing on mission readiness and craft safety.
Benefit: ViPER-ACV will improve the operations of individual ACV, and the ACV community as a whole. The integrated load, fuel, navigation, and comms planning assistant capabilities of ViPER-ACV will provide consistent planning outputs for the crew without having to worry about the tedious and error prone steps of using multiple lookup tables to generate plan components. The psychological effect of this is to get the experienced crewmembers head up out of the publications faster, spending more time and mental focus on the craft, the load, and crew readiness. ViPER-ACV provides new capabilities for visualizing the mission for one craft or for the whole operation, on an animated 4D display that combines a geographic display with a synch matrix timeline. All mission overlays, navigation constraints, threats, targets, and even planned craft tracks or lanes can be displayed, and the entire mission rehearsed and visualized for briefing and crew familiarization. This improves crew understanding and context of the overall mission without having to create a new mission briefing product, the rehearsal is a combination of all mission inputs already generated for the mission, on one display. For the Assault Craft Unit and EWTGs, ViPER-ACV supports standalone craft load, fuel, navigation, and comms planning using an identical application, and can use actual craft performance models vice the standard SEAOPS models so that the differences between craft can be observed. More realistic training, on an identical system, will improve crew proficiency and ability to handle mission changes. ViPER-ACVs ingesting of craft data from the DTD and using it to update the load and fuel models also exposes the craft data in a more useful way to maintainers and N4 staff for craft materiel assessment. Craft load and fuel records can be easily compared to identify trends and outliers, improving the ability to anticipate and correct problems earlier, which improves craft availability. The ViPER-ACV application has direct parallels in large scale air assault operations that use multiple heavy lift aircraft to transport an enormous array of equipment, often on short notice. ViPER-ACVs models, adapted to aircraft, would enable automatic distribution of load packages and publishing of loading and load security plans. In the commercial world, ViPER-ACV relates directly to large fleet ferry operations for planning and performance monitoring, as well as in emergency operations such as large scale firefighting efforts and Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief by distributing loads to the appropriate platform, auto-routing the platforms to optimize delivery, monitoring platforms to validate that the load and performance models are accurate and adjusting accordingly, and visualizing the entire operation of all platforms before, during, and after the mission.
Keywords: data visualization, data visualization, Artificial Intelligence, User-centered Design, Navigation, LCAC, mission planning
