Proactive Contextual Decision Support for Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Decision making is driven by context. Context can be hard to operationalize and harness to the design of decision support systems. Modern military task displays often omit important context which can lead to singificant errors. This problem is exemplified in undersea warfare and specifically contact management for safe littoral navigation. In littoral navigation, workload may be high and team members operating in discrete roles may proceed without awareness of important general context. This proposal addresses these issues by pairing PSEs expertise in designing scientifically principled interfaces to support challenging cognitive and collaborative tasks with Georgia Techs expertise in the cognitive science of the role of context in decision making. This proposal uses contact management and navigation in the littoral environment as an illustrative test case for the creation of PDS elements that integrate context into decision tools. Critically, rather than indiscriminate the unprincipled addition of context to current decision tools, we will utilize current decision science research to incorporate context into decision systems in a scientifically principled, intelligent, and effective way. Our proposal outlines the steps needed to combine current research with practice to create concept PDS elements supporting modern operational decision-making through the effective and appropriate integration of context.