Varna: Conceptual Development of Methods for Prioritizing, Presenting, and Monitoring Electronic Warfare Alerts

EW operators are increasingly flooded with information, including alert messages on a wide variety of topics, such as system status, system faults, situation reports, and target status. Staying abreast of these frequent alerts can cause operator error, fatigue, distraction from important duties, missed messages, and impaired situation awareness. Appropriately presenting alerts in the EW operator’s human-machine interface is a balancing act between necessary notification and unwanted distraction. Pacific Science & Engineering will develop automated methods to determine alert priorities for EW operators and then style the presentation of that alert appropriately to alert, inform, or log for future attention. Alert prioritization depends on several dynamic situational factors, including current mission requirements, the operator’s immediate tasking, the content and relevance of an alert, and operator current workload. Further, the system should continue to monitor alert status to ensure that alerts are appropriately addressed by the operator, as time and operational context allows. This requirement for sophisticated alert presentation and monitoring is critical for EW systems, and it is equally critical for related systems and display consoles, as well. Applying consistent methods for alert monitoring, prioritization, and presentation will make the entire suite of EW systems easier to use, manage, and train.