CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N192-093

Description

Theater anti-submarine warfare (TASW) watchstanders are responsible for maintaining the safety and security of ocean areas and US surface and sub-surface assets. They must process a large quantity of data to assess and prioritize potential threats. This analysis is complicated by irregular and noisy observational data, and different informational needs for watchstanders based on their roles and responsibilities. A decision aid is needed to avoid information overload and enable watchstanders to focus resources on the highest priority potential threats. To address these challenges, we propose to design the Adjustable Decision Aid for Prioritizing Threats (ADAPT) tool. ADAPT uses probabilistic models to combine expert knowledge, real-time observations, and user-configurable objectives to prioritize potential threats in multi-threat environments. ADAPT will encode expert knowledge in an extendable probabilistic modeling framework that uses real-time data from existing Undersea Warfare Decision Support System (USW-DSS) databases to assess the threat level of observed contacts. Relative threat severity is calculated across all contacts for individual watchstanders by encoding prioritization schemas dependent on their role into multi-criteria analysis algorithms. These algorithms incorporate observational uncertainty in assessing the threat likelihood and severity of a contact. The resulting threat prioritization is communicated to the watchstander using a customizable user interface.