A Decision Aid for a Surveillance Satellite Crew Shift Supervisor

To be effective in today's threat environment, the Air Force's Global Engagement doctrine asserts that personnel be responsive, innovative, adaptable, and agile. This will be particularly important for the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) Low CrewChief. The SBIRS Low Crew Chief will have to manage a team with frequently changing personnel, groups of personnel with different specializations, and a new mission - time critical target tracking. To assist the Crew Chief, we propose to develop adecision and training support system called Adaptive Decision Enabling and Performance Tracking (ADEPT). This system will be designed to support the Crew Chief in day-to-day operations and training exercises. It will utilize intelligent agent technologyto monitor and assess individual crewmember performance and team processes, and, based on its assessments, will provide guidance to help the Crew Chief manage the SBIRS Low team. For example, ADEPT will provide advice in real-time about how to allocateattention across different SBIRS Low subteams, how to manage their team-level activities and responses to various situations, and what feedback and guidance to provide.ADEPT will be developed as a decision and training aid for the SBIRS Low operationscenter, which includes Satellite Operations, Missile Warning, Ground Systems, and Intelligence cells. ADEPT may be of value to the training and operations of any organization in which any of these functions is performed. In particular, it could be usedby Navy, Army, and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite control organizations. Further, it may be adapted to support the training of personnel as they prepare to join an SBIRS operations crew. In addition, ADEPT may be valuable to the civilsatellite control agencies National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In particular, NASA and NOAA satellite control personnel have many responsibilities that mirror theresponsibilities of satellite operations personnel in the SBIRS Low crew and may therefore benefit from ADEPT's capabilities. Finally, the task performance and instructional content to be contained within the ADEPT agents could be used to help variousdefense, intelligence, and civil satellite control agencies develop more standardized procedures and move toward the goal of cost reduction through improved consolidation (Government Accounting Office, 2 May 1996). It is likely that the emphasis of this effort on team performance and team processes will result in an extension of existing decision and performance support technologies that is especially important in light of the modern trend, made possible by advances in information and communication technologies, toward increasingly large and complex teams. The resulting extension to decision and performance support technologies, coupled with consulting services, could be used to provide solutions to a wide range ofcorporate teams. In addition, ADEPT will contain much about how satellite system operators of varying levels of expertise perform their jobs and will identify difficulties they have in performing those jobs. Because this information will be representedby the iGEN model building interface in an easy-to-follow and structured way, CHI Systems and others will be able to use it to derive training documentation enhancements and to identify ways to improve SBIRS Low systems and processes.