APTIMA INC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: When submarines and surface vessels must work together to track targets over the horizon,

Description

When submarines and surface vessels must work together to track targets over the horizon, they need to closely communicate and coordinate their assets to ensure that information about the targets is shared; tasking is assigned and understood; and accurate, informed operational decisions are made in a timely manner. Complicating this coordination is the underlying tasking, decision making, and interpretation of the imprecise or ambiguous sensor data from the ownship and deployed assets, as well as the interrupted communications among the ships in the task group and between the ships and their deployed assets. Adaptive Decision-making for Distributed Assets (ADDA), a decision aid for a distributed network, uses adjustable autonomy between teams and systems to identify and remedy information bottlenecks by dynamically allocating tasking and workflow across the distributed resources and teams, according to the constraints of priorities and timing. Based on modeling of organizational structures and information flow, ADDA will employ proven technologies to recommend courses of action that adapt to changing tasking, priorities, and asynchronous communications and that are tailored to the needs and abilities of the individuals, teams, and systems.