Test-bed for Collaboration, Assessment, and Planning (T-CAP)

ABSTRACT: The Air Force command and control consists of distributed team members who must effectively collaborate to synchronize collective mission planning, briefing, and debriefing activities. To improve collaboration among distributed crews, technologies must manage training activities and evaluate collaborative performance. Current mission planning and evaluation systems fail to effectively communicate performance results. Thus, Aptima proposes to develop the Test-bed for Collaboration, Assessment, and Planning (T-CAP), a generalizable test-bed for measuring and assessing: how well distributed mission crews collaborate on mission planning; the effectiveness of specific mission planning, briefing, and debriefing technologies; and methods for delivering collaborative technologies and visualizing individual and crew performance during training. T-CAP will leverage existing measurement approaches and technologies to assess collaboration and mission planning, briefing, and debriefing performance, the results of which are effectively communicated to instructors and trainees via intuitive visualizations. When fully implemented, T-CAP will maximize training effectiveness by balancing the needs of training exercise managers, training managers, and trainees, and enable them to tailor subsequent training given the assessment of the distributed team and to tailor the use of enabling technologies given any assessed deficiencies and strengths during the training event BENEFIT: T-CAP will be a generalizable test-bed for measuring and assessing: how well distributed mission crews collaborate on mission planning; the effectiveness of specific mission planning, briefing, and debriefing technologies; and methods for delivering collaborative technologies and visualizing individual and crew performance during training. In support of collaboration among distributed teams, T-CAP will enable training managers to assess the effectiveness of collaborative mission planning tools on collaborative performance as well as how well the crews collaborate on mission planning activities given enabling technologies. This in turn will allow them both to tailor subsequent training given the assessment of the distributed team and to tailor the use of the enabling technologies given any assessed deficiencies and strengths during the training event. While we will develop a test-bed customized to meet the needs and challenges of Air Force operational training, our approach is designed to be generalizable and applicable to other DoD agencies and commercial organizations who face similar challenges and require improved performance measurement and assessment techniques, and technologies that possess the flexibility to meet future assessment needs. This product will be initially designed for AOC and ISR Analysts, but is proposed to be generalizable to any organization that engages in mission planning, briefing and debriefing activities, End users will benefit by receiving real-time feedback on the efficacy of various planning/briefing/debriefing technologies and enabling future mission planning sessions to be conducted with greater precision.