Smart Engine Mounts with Energy Managing Continuous Structural Elements

The Navy is under pressure to reduce shipboard manning levels in the face of ever-intensifying tactical responsibilities, battlespace tempo, and weapons lethality. There is thus an increasing need for team coordination, cohesiveness, and especiallyadaptability in operator task allocation during intense tactical operations. We propose to address this by designing a generic distributed agent-based Automatic Workload-Sensitive Task Allocator (AWOSTA) that: 1) identifies, defines, and elicits the staticpersonalities, behaviors, and knowledge of each team member; 2) identifies and assesses the dynamic behavior of the team and each individual member of the team; 3) displays individual and team workload to the team supervisor in an intuitive fashion; and 4)recommends re-tasking options to ensure optimal team performance throughout an engagement. We propose a multi-faceted approach to workload assessment (physiological-, subjective-, and performance-based), the use of belief network technology to combinedisparate measures of loading and performance, and an innovative task reallocation logic to optimize team performance. The Phase I effort will develop a prototype to explore the general feasibility of the overall approach. In Phase II we will focus on thedesign and implementation of a prototype for a specific shipboard system such as the Area Air Defense Commander.The commercial potential for a system with the capability to monitor team workload and stress and the ability to distribute tasks among membersof the team based on the measures is very high. Some of the most promising possibilities involve applying the technology in technical support centers, commercial air traffic control, police and other emergency dispatch operations.