Autonomous Platfrom evaluation and Optimization Software TooL (APOSTL)

Future Naval capabilities will be increasingly defined by the effectiveness of uncrewed underwater and surface vehicles (UUVs and USVs), operating alone, in small groups, or as part of a swarm. Leveraging these capabilities will require sophisticated software tools to analyze their effectiveness and optimize their performance. To fulfill these objectives, Daniel H. Wagner Associates (DHWA) proposes the research and development of an Autonomous Platform evaluation and Optimization Software TooL (APOSTL). This proposed software toolkit will leverage several cutting-edge software architectures, as well as DHWA’s innovative multi-objective optimization and evolutionary machine learning algorithms. APOSTL will be a highly modular data-centric evaluation and optimization engine, built on top of the Wagner Acoustic Simulation System (WASS), and leveraging our previous work with uncrewed vehicles and both acoustic and non-acoustic sensors. Additionally, APOSTL will analyze and optimize coordination between autonomous platforms by accounting for both underwater acoustic and traditional non-acoustic communications channels. A fully implemented APOSTL would be an ideal tool for tactical level optimization of UUV/USV deployment strategies and for evaluation of proposed platforms. Tradeoffs such as probability of mission completion, platform risk, time to complete mission, and other metrics would be provided for each scenario, allowing users and analysts to easily compare various approaches and the advantages and disadvantages of potential UUV/USV platforms.