Enhancing Sustainability and Applicability of Aircrew Performance Assessment Tools

Under prior efforts, BGI developed a process (Aircrew Performance Assessment (APA)) to decompose documented standards for individual aircrew performance and developed a prototype of software that uses decision trees based on the decomposed Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures from the doctrine to compare trainee performance in a simulated environment to these published standards and provide feedback and learning points. The prototype was built as an application in the Analysis and Reporting Tool (ART), which is a product of NAVAIR’s Modeling and Simulation Enterprise Applications (MSEA) team and is typically utilized with the Next Generation Threat System (NGTS). A common concern expressed during demonstrations of the APA prototype to end users was the ability to keep the analysis relevant to rapidly evolving tactics. Typical software update and deployment cycles cannot keep pace with typical tactics updates. In order to be useful, the APA capabilities must support modification of evaluation criteria at the end-user site, preferably without a need for software engineers and development tools. Such updates must also be made under a controlled and managed process to ensure that evaluations of aircrew performance are conducted against known valid criteria. An effort is proposed to address these concerns via development of a process and enabling tools and procedures to facilitate and partially automate tactics concurrency updates for APA. A CONOPS and a set of ground rules will be developed to align the process with end user operations and restrictions, and will include critical aspects such as user permissions, configuration management, and cybersecurity. An architecture for the process will be developed and validated with representatives of the user community. Development of any software components required to implement the process will be performed utilizing a traditional Crawl/Walk/Run approach. Decision trees for tactics decomposed under the prior effort will become the baseline for new tactics decomposition tools, and initially allow simple modifications to those trees. Capabilities will be incrementally added toward a final goal of supporting decomposition of new tactics for multiple platforms. The research and development efforts will be executed under an agile paradigm with involvement from the TPOC, end user representatives, and the MSEA eART development team.