Collaborative Undersea Warfare Mission Planning for Manned and Unmanned Vehicles

Individual undersea warfare (USW) assets have a wide variety of sensors at their disposal (passive acoustic, active acoustic monostatic, active acoustic bi-static, electronic support measures, electro-optical/infrared, etc.). Many of these assets and sensors tend to have separate standalone mission planning systems or applications that include differing displays of capability and/or estimated performance, and may be subject to environments that are variable both in space and in time. This ultimately increases the physical and cognitive burden on operators to consolidate and interpret multiple mission planning displays and information to understand the tactical situation. Sensor performance predictions need to be updated routinely due to dynamic oceanographic and atmospheric changes, which also increases operator workload with multiple systems requiring the same information. Adaptive Methods proposes the Collaborative Optimization/Mission Planning/Assessment of Sensors Software (COMPASS) that can address these issues by providing a visualization framework to: integrate mission planning tools and tactical decision aids; aggregate data from multiple sources; and allow sensor performance predictions to be composited and easily manipulated using 3D rendering and touch-enabled interfaces. Existing mission planning capability will be incorporated along with multi-objective optimization functions to aid in indicating the performance of individual and groups of manned and unmanned assets and sensors.