Resilient Environment for Teams of Agents Making Decisions (RE-TEAM II)

Submarine commanders must make complex decisions to accomplish increasingly diverse missions. Moreover, concurrent missions may involve contradictory requirements. Planning must also account for the unexpected, including equipment failures, environmental factors, or external events that impact the ship's mission(s). Since all submarine operations involve a degree of risk, the commander must balance mission performance with safety of the ship and crew. Partially automating this trade-off reasoning, however, represents a significant departure from conventional notions of naval command and control (C2). If the Navy is to embrace or encourage such a future, naval C2 systems must provide two key capabilities: (1) enabling resilient planning and optimal execution of missions and tasks; and (2) helping to analyze alternative courses of action (COAs) and their trade-offs. We propose to develop and evaluate a Resilient Environment for Teams of Agents Making Decisions (RE-TEAM). Our proposed RE-TEAM system will reduce information overload, remain robust under unexpected events, and improve the quality of submarine decisions.