Fire Control Battle Management and Decision Support System Technology

Future battlefields will require independent operations and increased operational tempo, placing severe burdens on weapons platform crewmembers in the areas of information flow management, data fusion, and assessment of data to arrive at the most tactically acceptable decisions. Work continues in the development of decision aids to assist direct/indirect fire weapon platform commanders in accomplishing their myriad tasks ranging from operational employment and defense of the platform to prognostic and diagnostic applications. Additionally, the development of smart mines poses an interesting challenge to minefield control and application through the use of decision aids. Technology development is needed to address methodologies for development of distributed, real-time expert system decision aids and specific algorithmic issues associated with their development and evaluation. A common need in any direct/indirect fire system and smart mine field control decision aid suite is a tactical situation assessment (TSA) module which rapidly assesses available information, feeds subordinate modules actionable data, and presents recommendations as appropriate. The proposed project addresses the TSA function because of its commonality to all battlefield control systems and because the methodology to solve this complex function should be readily applicable to other, more clearly defined embedded decision aid modules.