Integrated Collaborative Mission Planning, Briefing and Debriefing Tools for Crews and Teams in LVC Operations

ABSTRACT: The mission life cycle involves many steps and participants. Each step, from planning to mission briefings, mission execution, and debriefs, requires close collaboration between participants. Even a localized crisis response may involve geographically scattered participants. There is a proliferation of data in the process, but getting this data to the right people at the right time is a challenge, and distribution limitations on some data can be an obstacle with health and safety implications. Net-centric technologies that facilitate the collection and fusion of disparate data sources in a distributed environment have evolved significantly in the last few years. So have team collaboration and online meeting tools. These technologies, coupled with visualization frameworks, have resulted in successful team collaboration software used by many government agencies. The First Responder community is a great candidate for the next success story, as its mission is critical to crisis response. Combining these net-centric technologies into an operational version of the Mission Collaboration Tool (MCT) that TechFlow Scientific prototyped in Phase I will provide a solution for collaboration support for the First Responder mission life cycle, and the product will interface well with other hardware and software solutions being developed in that community. BENEFIT: Collaboration on the mission life cycle by distributed participants is a common need and challenge across the military, law enforcement, government agencies, and First Responders. The tool sets and integrated environment that TechFlow Scientific proposes to develop in this effort will have broad applicability and utility across these sectors, and others. Just as internet searching has rationalized the complexity of the web, so data fusion and SA displays will help to rationalize decision making in an increasingly complex command and control environment, whether that be military or civilian. A common theme in the challenges and lessons learned from the responses to past crises is that a single, transparent, easily accessed but password protected, unclassified web-based process for information sharing between participant crews and teams would have mitigated many of the challenges to effective crisis response. The Mission Collaboration Tool (MCT) will be invaluable in meeting the real-time collaboration needs of the First Responder community. Integrating with existing tools and processes in Phase II will make the MCT an even greater asset. The first planned product that will encompass the proposed technology will be an MCT for First Responders in an LVC environment, and TechFlow Scientific will work with the 711 HPW/RHAS Warfighter Readiness Research Division to establish a long-term role for the MCT there and at Calamityville. The design and experience with the underlying technologies can also be applied to similar problems at other organizations. TechFlow Scientific plans to work toward commercialization of the MCT next by leveraging the development experience and design of the MCT to build similar tools for other organizations. Probable customers are emergency response centers in both military and government agencies (law enforcement, firefighting, etc.) for use in exercises and training, or during operations. The estimated market size encompasses tens of organizations. TechFlow Scientific could use the building blocks developed for the MCT to develop custom applications, as the design is very modular, and there is an advantage in developing a code base that represents portions of the tool that will be common to all applications. The demand for this type of system is large, and we anticipate it growing.