OptCrew: Optimized Manning and Crew Design Tools for Future Surface and Undersea Platforms

Recognizing the need to reduce manpower costs overall, the Navy has undertaken new strategies in weapon systems design, with a focus on significantly reducing manpower and workload requirements. The necessary next step is to develop OptCrew, a suite of tools and models to help identify the optimal design for future platforms, providing a balance of system capability with human affordability without sacrificing mission effectiveness. OptCrew will help manpower planners identify high workload drivers and other design aspects that drive excessive manpower costs, such as lengthy training pipelines or maintenance requirements that may be workload-intensive or require training-intensive skill sets. Furthermore, these will be linked to specific operational contexts in order to formulate the appropriate metrics, necessary for the quantitative analyses of the proposed alternatives.