Raytheon BBN Technologies

Enhanced Interfaces to Support Complex Airlift Operations

Cambridge, Mass., April 3, 2007 — BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today it has been awarded $1.7M in funding by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Human Effectiveness Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to enhance intuitive interfaces for duty officers at Air Mobility Command (AMC) to enable greater efficiency and productivity, improve the decision-making process, and increase overall situational awareness.

Air Force personnel often must integrate information from several sources, including weather conditions and airfield and mission data, to help them make mission-critical decisions. These intuitive interfaces, running over AMC's data systems, will support duty officers in planning and replanning more efficiently when dealing with complex, unforeseen operations, such as moving a critical patient to medical facilities at a distant location. To plan such an operation, a duty officer would need to identify, assign, and possibly relocate both the medical crew and the flight crew as well as identify the necessary medical equipment and supplies required for their transportation.

"The men and women of the Air Force are often responsible for organizing complex operations with little or no advance warning," said Tad Elmer, president and CEO, BBN Technologies. "The work that BBN is doing will help them accomplish their critical, frequently live-saving, missions with greater efficiency, less stress, and tremendous cost savings."

The enhanced interfaces will support planning of both the new, emergency operation and the replanning of scheduled, disrupted operations. Using emerging cognitive engineering methods called Work Centered Support Systems (WCSS), the interfaces map out the decision space with views of missions and their resource constraints on a common timescale. As the WCSS is updated with near real-time AMC mission data, duty officers are able to rapidly understand the meaning of an alert and "see" the factors affecting mission viability and possible solutions. Using this advanced visualization technology, duty officers will be able to see the overall situation clearly in a single interface without consulting numerous databases, allowing them to navigate the information more quickly. Additionally, the system will show how these decisions impact other missions and operations by presenting the downstream affects on resources, such as crew, airplanes, and cargo. Such comprehensive situational awareness quickly gives Air Force duty officers the information they need to make the best decisions to successfully complete their missions.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, is focused on solving some of the world's most pressing problems. From national security, information security, speech recognition and language translation, to integrating disparate systems and networks, BBN has been at the forefront of technological change for over 50 years. Known for pioneering the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, BBN continues to create advances in Internet and networking technologies through its work on ad hoc networking, the semantic web, quantum communications, and advanced protocols. Building on its substantial list of firsts, BBN operates the first metro quantum cryptography network, the first real-time foreign broadcast monitoring system, and has developed the world's first stereoscopic digital mammography system. For more information on BBN Technologies, visit www.bbn.com.