Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE) Software Platform

The DoD is faced with the national security challenge of developing adversary-exceeding military capabilities, across a variety of possible scenarios and contexts, over an enduring period into the future. This challenge is highly complex but can be addressed using state-of-the-art decision sciences, analytics, and artificial intelligence at both the system and the portfolio capability levels. This enables identifying, evaluating, and exploring complex trade-offs across performance, life-cycle costs, acquisition schedules, and procurement quantities, among other factors. Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration (MATE) is a methodology that enables value-driven and data-supported exploration and analysis of the relationships between various solutions, benefits, and costs. MATE provides a structured analytic framework that incorporates stakeholder values, contextual variations and uncertainties, broad ranging future warfighting performance evaluation modeling, generation of large sets of alternatives, and exploration of trade-offs across those alternatives with tested algorithms and advanced interactive visual analytics. MATE also provides the basis for integrating trusted data that will enable application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to collaboratively explore extremely complex search spaces not previously possible. This project will build a working software platform that will enable and enhance applications of MATE to both system and portfolio-level acquisition analytics challenges of critical importance to the DoD.