Distributed Threat Evaluation in Naval Tactical Battle Management

Abstract : Threat evaluation is a critical function in naval battle management command and control. It involves taking into account a large number of variables and requires making complex inferences under time and uncertainty constraints. Collaborative threat evaluation within a multi-unit and geographically dispersed force can reduce the uncertainty factor by bringing to the process additional information sources and computational power and providing more capability and robustness. However, it also introduces many communication and coordination challenges. This paper presents an automated and adaptive system that performs threat evaluation for a naval task force. The proposed capability supports different coordination methods, each enforcing a different approach to collaborative threat evaluation in the distributed context of force operations. Moreover, it adapts its coordination method to changes in the tactical situation, whether dictated by the status of the communication links or as the consequence of the choice of a specific command structure by the force command team. Besides the coordination layer, the capability includes a set of threat evaluation algorithms that determine the level and the ranking of the threats. A modeling and simulation environment has been developed to allow the evaluation and demonstration of the force-level threat evaluation capability. The presentation includes briefing charts.