ADAPTIVE METHODS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N101-048

Description

The current ASW route planning and asset allocation algorithms suffer from several major shortcomings. First, the current capability provides solutions that are often counterintuitive and have little tactical utility. Second, the operator has virtually no insight or control over the solutions. Third, the current capability emphasizes an overt and offensive ASW posture when developing solutions. Combined, these shortcomings mean that operators are presented with a solution, have no understanding of why it is effective, cannot impact the solution with knowledge and constraints that only the operator knows, and must ultimately make an “all or nothing” decision to follow the generated plan. As a result, the current capability is effectively a black box solution that is effective for a very small set of problems and does not allow the operator to explore and analyze the search space. The existing Navy Mission Planning capability focuses on “overt search” by optimizing a single objective function called the Cumulative Probability of Detection. The proposed solution, Context-Aware Multiple Objective Planning (CMOP), expands its applicability by considering multiple objective optimization where the objective functions are selected based on mission context.