Decision Support Extension Tailored Ecological Representations (DEXTER)

Navy decision makers perform Courses of Action (COA) analysis in a dynamic mission environment, where real-time situational understanding and COA analysis are crucial to mission success. Existing decision aids provide information for a single point in time, including static two-dimensional visualizations that are not capable of representing the mission space across time, which is necessary for multi-unit and multi-domain coordination. Information necessary to perform COA analysis is distributed across a number of separate decision support aids, requiring decision makers to manually aggregate mission parameters from multiple information sources to gain adequate situational understanding. In response to these challenges, we propose to design and demonstrate 5-D Decision Support Extension Tailored Ecological Representations (DEXTER) that support decision maker situational understanding for effective COA analysis through efficient 5-D ecological visualizations within an automated data integration framework. We use proven Cognitive Systems Engineering methods to understand the cognitive and context specific needs of decision makers in the COA analysis work domain in order to design ecological visualizations. These 5-D visualizations reduce cognitive workload by enhancing understanding of related data elements across time and physical space in the area of operation, resulting in more effective and efficient exploration, and evaluation of courses of action.