Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Military naval task-force operations are operations involving several national or allied platforms that are coordinated to achieve given missions. In such operations, threat evaluation is the process of observing the behaviour of potentially hostile entities, such as enemy aircraft or missiles, to determine their goals, plans, intent, capability and opportunity for causing damage to protected assets. This process is conducted by human operators based on information provided mainly through a tactical picture. Given the very high complexity of naval task-force threat evaluation tasks, a decision support system is required to enhance decision quality by reducing the risk of errors for operators, and provide cognitive support to reduce their workload. This project brings together CAE (a Canadian world leading company in training simulators) and the Université de Sherbrooke to investigate, design, implement, and evaluate such a decision support system. The key components of this system will be novel threat evaluation expert models and user models, together with original system architecture and algorithms that process these models to provide useful support to operators during threat evaluation. The same system will be used to guide students/trainees in learning threat evaluation concepts through simulations. Additionally, the system will generate performance traces that will assist instructors in evaluating students/trainees and determining their needs for further training or additional courses. Considering that threat evaluation is an important problem in other areas, not just military (for example, network security), this project will also indirectly contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the design of decision support tools for threat evaluation in similar domains. The project will also enable graduate students to gain a valuable expertise and become highly qualified in a very sensitive field much needed for Canada.