Submarine Tactical Planner (SubTaP)

Submarine commanders are currently hamstrung in tactical mission planning due to the limited capability to assess operational options in response to changes in the threat, environment or assigned objectives. Current techniques to evaluate the assigned mission take little advantage of the recent leap in decision support and visualization technology and rely greatly on the manual methodology used during the Cold War. In response to SBIR N04-066, 21st Century Systems, Inc. is pleased to propose researching and developing the Submarine Tactical Planner (SubTaP), an advanced decision support system that will enable the operator to project his ship into the mission area and run sophisticated scenarios over the entire range of expected and unexpected conditions. This tool will have intelligent agent software that can be readily assigned to perform optimization calculations to guide the commander in determining how best to employ his ship in response to a variety of "what if?" situations. The results of this agent-based planning process will be presented to the operator on a 2D/3D display that will clearly allow for visualization of uncertainty as well as the best, average, and worst case over the range of assumptions.