CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N19B-T029

Description

Effective mission planning is critical for military strategy and execution. This process is complex as human operators must consider many variables (e.g., resource limitations, threats, risks) when formulating a plan to accomplish mission goals. Although powerful tools, such as the Navy’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), provide advanced functionality, mission planning remains a hybrid activity across human operators and mission planning tools. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can facilitate an improved mission planning process. To effectively integrate these technologies into mission planning, we propose to design and demonstrate Joint User-centered Planning artificial Intelligence Tools for Effective mission Reasoning (JUPITER), an AI-based mission planning framework founded on joint cognitive system principles united with an advanced library of AI/ML capabilities for effective and efficient mission planning. We will identify opportunities for AI methods to support the mission planning process, such as by overcoming individual bias, discovering hidden alternatives, offloading extensive manual processing and analysis of low-level information, and incorporating historical and contextual information. JUPITER will use a joint cognitive system (JCS) approach to uniquely frame human operator and AI as a single unit, enabling human-AI teams to jointly collaborate and address the challenging and complex mission planning process.