Threat Assessment and Prioritization (TAP)

Theater Anti-Submarine Warfare (TASW) officers track, assess, and prioritize threats in order to maintain situation awareness and plan operations. Threat assessments are based upon the impacts and likelihoods of alternate Enemy Courses of Action (eCOAs). Using current tools and manual processes, it is time-consuming to maintain situation awareness, reassess threats, and update their prioritizations. This can delay or impair situation awareness, leading to suboptimal tasking of resources to threats and increased risk to assets and their missions. We propose to develop the Threat Assessment and Prioritization (TAP) system, a set of USW-DSS services and Tactical Decision Aids (TDAs) that will provide information integration, analysis, hypotheses management, and visualizations for TASW threat prioritization. TAP will help TASW teams assess threats more quickly and comprehensively by fusing information and detecting tactical events automatically. TAP capabilities will include: Situation monitoring: TAP continuously monitors data feeds in order to estimate the value of temporal, spatial, and behavioral variables used to recognize tactical events and assess threats. Tripwire monitoring: TAP provides a customizable alert service to define tripwires supporting Commander Critical Information Requirements. Alerts are generated when tripwire conditions are satisfied by the tactical situation. Hypothesis management: TAP uses historical data, intel, and threat behavior models to suggest eCOAs; TAP continuously integrates information to calculate eCOA likelihoods. Threat assessment and prioritization: TAP allows the users to customize the threat prioritization criterion per mission goals; TAP continuously assesses threats and continuously estimates threat priorities; TAP uses Multi Criteria Decision Methods to prioritize threats. Threat Response Recommendations: TAP suggests threat responses per tripwire definitions and supports global resource allocations to plan responses to multiple threats. The overarching goal of this effort is to enhance TASW officers’ understanding of the past, present, and future of the tactical picture in order to prioritize threats and make plans to counter those threats.  TAP’s main innovations include: Data models and algorithms to represent and evaluate high-level factors considered for threat assessment and prioritization. Multi Criteria Decision Analysis Tools that allow users to customize the prioritization criterion used to rank ASW threats. A customizable alert service to define tripwires detecting tactical events of interest. A tactical decision aid providing visualization and display interactions to make operators aware of the more important threats and events occurring in the ASW Theater.