CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A13-078

Description

The managers of military facilities are legally and ethically bound to address the effects of their operations on the environment. Individual facility managers themselves, however, are unlikely to have the specific expertise necessary to project and mitigate the long-term effects of contaminant release. In addition, these tasks compete with the day-to-day operational aspects of their roles, including the general logistics of scheduling, deconflicting, and managing test and training operations As a result, facility managers require explicit support to efficiently recognize, understand, and respond to long-term environmental threats, but this support must provide specific recommendations about effective mitigation strategies while not increasing workload significantly. To provide that support, we propose to design and demonstrate a Toxic Industrial Chemical Functional Analysis System for Training Exercise Ranges (TIC-FASTER). TIC-FASTER supports the specific tasks and decision-making processes of facility managers within the broader context of key workflows, responsibilities, training, and knowledge of that user community. It also supports facility managers in reasoning about environmental impacts by providing straight-forward access to expert knowledge and model results. Finally, it supports efficient reasoning about mitigation strategies without relying entirely on the manual review and interpretation of technical documents by providing automated information extraction.