Automated Situational Understanding for Undersea Warfare Decision Support

The Anti Submarine Warfare Commander (ASWC) needs an accurate operational picture and timely answers to critical questions in order to take effective action. They operate under severe time pressure, performing complex multi-component decision tasks, and in rapidly evolving and changing information and situational states. Our overarching technical objective for the proposed work is to provide an effective, flexible USW Situational Understanding Framework (SU-Framework) from which tools and systems can be built that help warfigthers rapidly obtain clear and accurate situation understanding. The proposed technology will make new and emerging data types and sources available to the warfighter in a concise, actionable presentation by automatically organizing, prioritizing, fusing and reasoning upon entity data to estimate the value of situational entities. This project will provide rapid integration and non-trivial reasoning; judiciously select all"useful"data which maximizes hypothesis discrimination in order to provide consistent, formal inference for expert-quality deductions. The SU-Framework is both extendable and open to mitigate risks of unknown future requirements and technology. Ultimately the SU-Framework will facilitate transitioning newer, better technologies into CV-TSC V2 Increment 3 and future builds of USW-DSS allowing ASW warfigthers to exploit more information while shielding them from the need to manually work through it.