CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A18-049

Description

Tactical Commanders must successfully integrate and manage dynamic, time-sensitive battlefield information from large numbers of heterogeneous sources to perform their jobs effectively. While new tools enable a wider distribution of Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (C3I) information, existing systems are severely limited by procedures and methods and are not typically designed to adequately support the underlying cognitive work and information needs of tactical decision makers. To address these needs, we propose to design and demonstrate Operational Representations and Interactive Overlay Environment (ORION). This system will combine tightly coordinated, advanced data visualizations for individual information exploration and reasoning with deeply integrated collaboration tools to provide a shared understanding of the battlespace. Combined, ORION will effectively support Tactical Commanders’ real-time information exploration, manipulation, and exploitation of resources within a flexible and role-tailored workspace. To address key informational requirements and processing activities across a range of decision-makers, we will perform a cognitive analysis and then use the outputs of this analysis to design novel ecological interaction methods to support Commanders throughout the decision-making process. Finally, we will assess the feasibility of our proposed approach through rapid prototyping development to demonstrate information display tools and collaborative capabilities for the ORION system with representative personnel.