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

ABSTRACT: Mission planning, briefing, and debriefing in live virtual constructive (LVC) exercises has become a distributed operation. These exercises produce mission data that must be disseminated to all local and remote players for instructional and research purposes. The warfighter"s ability to modify and distribute this mission data is currently limited. A fully distributed and automatically managed mission recording and playback capability is needed for mission planning, briefing, and debriefing in both crew and team mission areas. Significant advancements in software technology and automation for data management, fusion, and dissemination, as well as online learning, web-based visualization, and software decision support tools can be put to use in meeting this current need. The TechFlow Scientific team has an established background in web-based technology and automation for data management, fusion, dissemination, and visualization in providing situational awareness and decision support tools to the Army and the Air Force. Our team also includes subject matter experts in mission planning, briefing, and debriefing. We will leverage our solid background in mission planning and our experience with development of web-based interactive tools to design and develop an online tool for distributed mission planning, briefing, and debriefing in LVC exercises. BENEFIT: The software developed under this SBIR will have broad applicability to online team collaboration in both the military and the private sector. Any military agency that is involved in mission planning could benefit from using this software to bring geographically distributed mission planning teams together. We could also apply the developed tools and techniques in this software to the general problem of comprehensive team collaboration for events or complex tasks for other military teams or private sector business. Army and Navy aviation mission planning units could benefit from the application of this tool to their mission planning, briefing, and debriefing processes. We will also investigate other possible groups in the Army and Navy that have mission planning, briefing, and debriefing processes that are not aviation-oriented, and offer to adapt our tool to benefit their processes. Major commercial airline carriers could also benefit from using the developed toolset for flight planning, as a way to automate the processes of evaluating routing changes and flight planning modifications. We can also apply the developed toolset to help automate large team collaboration on event management for large commercial organizations, from planning to post-event review. This will offer a much-needed tool in a time when events have become very complex operations, and efficiency and liability are important considerations. The widespread current need for these kinds of software tools, and the even greater future needs, make the probability of success with our product set very high.