Comanche Tactics and Survivability Expert Planner

U.S. Army attack helicopters are arguably among the most lethal, responsive and flexible components of U.S. armed forces today, and the Comanche weapon system will see that they remain so for the foreseeable future. To live up to its potential, however,the Comanche must also be survivable on the modern battlefield, which in turn demands fast and accurate organic tactical decision making processes and supporting information technologies/tools/systems. An automated Comanche survivability and tactics expertplanner (C-STEP) is needed to recognize battlefield situations, support identification of routes and tactics that reduces/minimizes detection by threats, increases survivability, and maximizes target detection and Comanche lethality. An easy-to-use,intuitive automated tool that could aid the Comanche pilot in either pre-planned or real-time selection and evaluation of alternative routes/tactics according to user-selected criteria will be tremendously valuable to Comanche pilots. A tool that couldalso automatically find and display optimal routes and tactics according to user-selectable criteria will be even more valuable, with the potential to increase the probability of success of any Comanche mission where survivability is an issue. Thisresearch will research and prove the concept of such a C-STEP tool.Commercial applications of automated real-time adaptive decision support include transportation applications analogous to the Comanche expert planner problem and financial industryapplications where complexity and time-sensitivity make human performance problematic.