CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N141-019

Description

Current mission planning interfaces are difficult to understand and cumbersome to use, resulting in few operators utilizing the full power of advanced planning systems. To address this critical shortfall, we will design and demonstrate a set of Intuitive User Interfaces for Task-Tailored planning (INTUIT). These interfaces will increase the usability of planning systems and the efficiency of operators with varying skill levels across a range of vehicles, mission contexts, and unique tasks. INTUIT will provide targeted support to novice and expert mission planners by adapting to unique operator, task, and mission needs, as well as fluidly exposing opportunities for advanced planning functionality when appropriate. To ensure that these displays truly address the specific capabilities, tasks, and workflows of mission planners, we will adopt an iterative process of analysis, design, and prototyping grounded in proven Cognitive Systems Engineering methods. Finally, we will extend existing in-house display tools to rapidly prototype INTUIT mission planning displays. We will use these prototypes to demonstrate and evaluate our approaches and to deeply explore the complexities of mission planning across vehicles, operators, and mission contexts. INTUIT initially will target enhanced interfaces for the Joint Mission Planning System and can be broadly transitioned to other planning systems.