APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N192-093

Description

The Navy faces an increasingly complex undersea operational environment in which autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle capabilities are proliferating, and conventional submarines continue being challenging to detect. Managing this environment requires watchstanders to (1) prioritize threats and (2) maintain situational awareness of the AOR, which present significant cognitive challenges.RED OCTOBER is a visual analytics system for Ranking and Efficiently Detecting Overwhelming and/or Combined Threat Operations Based on Effectiveness and Recency. Its goal is to leverage human-machine problem-solving capabilities to address the complex problems of threat prioritization and situational awareness in the TASW domain, thus enabling optimal mission execution. Interpretable analytics will quantify the components of threat, based on user input and mission parameters, and aggregate those components’ outputs into a threat priority score. Corresponding visualizations will support threat prioritization by providing watchstanders with an ordered list of threats and their current and future positions relative to the Force or a designated high value unit. RED OCTOBER will quantify sensors’ effectiveness and current sensor data’s utility. Visualizations of these data will improve situational awareness by enabling watchstanders to derive answers to complex operational questions, such as redundancy of sensor capabilities, and a sensor's comparative utility given its observation history.