Intelligent Automation, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: ABSTRACT: Air and Space Operations Center (AOC) planners need to consider DIME activities

Description

ABSTRACT: Air and Space Operations Center (AOC) planners need to consider DIME activities and PMESII effects when constructing or selecting a Course of Action (COA) ,and when sharing their thoughts and knowledge with representatives from others. To construct a visualization tool that leads planners to consider non-kinetic effects and enables knowledge sharing of DIME and PMESII factors, the IAI team will use its successful User Centered Design process and our strong team members to create our Interactive Decision Analysis tool. Our team includes three experienced AOC planners (from Engility Corp.), a world-class decision scientist (Dr. Don MacGregor), and ISS, a software firm that makes the software for the AOC, and Human Factors Engineers and Graphic Artists from Intelligent Automation Inc. We will spend Phase I collaborating to build a great design, Phase II incorporating it into existing AOC software and testing it, and Phase III transitioning it across AOC and other C2 operations. While we do not want to specify a solution prematurely, our early conversations with Engility SMEs have been most productive. While they do consider non-kinetic effects regularly, we are leaning toward an interface that guides them to consider non-kinetic factors and interactions through which they share knowledge. BENEFIT: Air Force military planners need to consider all the effects of their missions, not just the military effects. While military planners do that, they need to understand the outputs from the mathematical algorithms that consider all the possible effects. We will provide users of decision support tools ways to interact with model outputs so they come to understand and trust the models. The commercialization of this system can be applied to any decision support system that uses the common multi-attribute decision analysis algorithm to recommend a COA. While we will demonstrate the utility of this system in AOCs, it can be useful for a wide variety of other uses, many with strong commercial possibilities: The closest uses are for other military planners. Not just in the AOC, but for planners in other Air Force planning venues and in planning in the other services. Decision planning with understanding through guided interactions can be useful organizations with security and public safety functions similar to the military: police forces, fire services, and specialized law enforcement agencies, such as the DEA or the FBI. Decision planning with guided interactions will be useful for individuals choosing between medical treatment options (and their organizations which provide those treatments, like Kaiser.