HazPro: Hazardous Material Preparer Mobile Software

Imagine you are a young Airman preparing to deploy for the first time. You have been assigned as your unitÆs cargo increment monitor and told to prepare all associated SDDGs for Hazardous Materials listed within your Unit Type Codes (UTC) deployment packages. You crack open your AFMAN 24-604; you are lost. The regulation shows you have over 535 pages of shipment configuration options, along with thousands of deviations, waivers, and special permits. It is just too much, especially for someone who does not perform this task regularly. Hazardous materials documentation can be hard to prepare because many regulations and requirements must be followed. Depending on the type and quantity of hazardous materials you are shipping, you may need different forms, labels, and packaging. You must also ensure that the information you provide is accurate and consistent. This highly manual process is not agile enough to meet demanding timelines; a new modern approach that maximizes human-machine integration is needed. Deployment execution is hampered by antiquated manual processes that require many subject matter experts (SMEs) to ensure mission accomplishment. A gap exists in automating capabilities for the mobility machine to give time back to Airmen to focus on other facets of mission generation. Additionally, adaptive technology can remove non-value-added activities and decrease augmentation training. Existing siloed SMEs hinder flexibility and adaptability in ever-changing operational environments with limited capabilities in enabling rapid deployment execution, ultimately distracting commanders from focusing on emerging rapid mobilizations. Our Technical Approach for HazPro will be the following: Modernize manual SDDG creation, which involves manual identification and step-based checklists Phase I will research state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods to modernize SDDG with mobile software to enhance military readiness Explore how military SDDG use cases can be modernized by enhancing the Technergetics mobility software platform We will use the Phase I period of performance to perform technical research in the following: Research SOTA methods for computer Vision-based HAZMAT object identification Research Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for key markings Research checklist automation with Decision Trees Perform Mobile Application User-Centered Design