APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A20-055

Description

The Army is moving to decentralized command posts to adapt to a changing adversary landscape. This objective is currently hindered, however, by a data infrastructure that performs sub-optimally in tactical environments in which the constraints of such degraded, intermittent, low bandwidth (DIL) settings result in limited computing power, in addition to limited information volume and accessibility. To resolve DIL-constrained information management, a system must properly capture, assess, and reason over the communications, cognitive, and contextual characteristics of distributed and asynchronous mission command. Further, it must not limit itself to static, a priori schemes of prioritization, but rather scale dynamically to optimize policies in real-time as missions unfold, and distributed command posts and their Warfighters require the right information at the right time. To address these needs, Aptima and partners Apex Analytics Group and Caspian Consulting propose C3PO: the Communication, Cognition, and Context for Prioritization and Optimization approach. C3PO will consist of AI models for data management that prioritize and optimize the flow of information to and from command posts based on real-time communications, cognitive needs, and the mission context. Ultimately, C3PO will constitute the blueprint for an Army framework that listens for data to identify valuable information and optimizes how, when, and to whom to deliver it, while accounting for the limiting constraints of the DIL context and the needs of mission command staff.