Blue Force Readiness, Activity, and Capability Modeling Engine (BlueFRAME)

ABSTRACT: In the modern battlespace, US forces must operate in a coordinated fashion across organizational and functional lines. Despite the increasing sophistication of the information systems supporting them, Warfighters are confronted with"stovepipes,"making it difficult to gain a full appreciation of blue force activities involving others outside of their immediate organization. Without such knowledge, the decision-making that drives military operations spanning air, space, and cyber domains will be sub-optimal and potentially detrimental. To support situation awareness of blue force activities, we propose to design and demonstrate a Blue Force Readiness, Activity, and Capability Modeling Engine (BlueFRAME) that represents, informs, maintains, and evolves computational situation models. Our approach includes four primary components: (1) a semantically rich, logically grounded computational representation that can capture complex situation models including concepts and associations; (2) a demand-driven translation service that rectifies raw blue force sensor feeds based on active situation models; (3) a deductive inference layer that analyzes and projects blue force states; and (4) an empirically informed inductive inference layer that learns associations based on historical blue force data. During Phase I, we will create a demonstration prototype that leverages in-house and external commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to validate the feasibility of our approach for supporting situation awareness of blue force activities. BENEFIT: The research performed under this effort will have immediate benefit to Air Operations Center Weapon System (AOC WS) and its configuration across multiple regional and functional AOCs. Additionally, advances in this area of situation modeling and analysis could help in other military domains across air, maritime, ground, and space operations. This research will also have direct application to enhance our commercial DRIVE product, a software development kit for geospatial visualization.