Raytheon BBN Technologies

Cognitive Visualization, Alerting, and Optimization (CVAO) for the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM)

In an effort managed by the Air Force Research Lab’s (AFRL’s) 711th Human Performance Wing, Raytheon BBN Technologies brings its extensive experience in optimizing the Human-Machine Collaboration to bear in support of world-wide transportation logistics planning at USTRANSCOM. The goal is to produce tools to reduce the cognitive burden on planners so that they can produce more effective and accurate plans, more efficiently, while facilitating a trust for information presented. Information is only as accurate as the data from which it is derived. Authoritative sources for data are made transparent to the user in order to ensure trust in the tool. Through tailored visualizations, planners have more control over the planning process, particularly where multiple plans may conflict in the use of transportation mode and port resources. Business rules, limiting factors, and changing priorities factor into what is presented to the user at various points in their planning effort, thus reducing the user’s cognitive burden in repeatedly making rapid and well-informed decisions. Tools developed must be intuitive and easy to learn due to frequent rotating military assignments coupled with minimal training time.

• One tool developed automatically evaluates transportation plans based on simulation technology.
• By allowing rapid exploration of multiple variants of each plan, the user is able to get a more complete appreciation of the overall decision space.
• Understanding effects (even small) and related possibilities leads to better course of action choices.
• Another tool developed uses constraint based scheduling techniques.
• By enabling an early look at the capacity required to support influxes in demand, the user can more quickly provide informed forecasts.
• This tool allows the user to collaborate with an automated scheduler so that complex logistical constraints can be quickly met which then allows the user more time to focus on critical decisions.
• Allowing the user to drill into short falls in capacity results in the ability to make trade-offs that honor the highest priorities of the Warfighter.

Sensemaking and Decision Technologies Expertise:

Our Team of experts brings cognitive analysis, work centered design, and symbiotic planning methods to the challenge of supporting USTRANSCOM Planners.

Work-Centered Design is based on principles of Cognitive Engineering coming out of the realm of cognitive psychology and human factors. Symbiotic Planning focuses on building systems in which human operators collaborate with opaque automated support tools to produce solutions better than either one could do alone.

• A Cognitive Psychologist leads efforts to study workers in their work space as well as efforts to obtain accurate and unbiased prototype feedback.
• A visualization expert, or User Interface Designer, translates workers’ needs into cognitively based interfaces which intuitively support the work at hand.
• The Lead Scientist on the Team brings over 25 years of experience in the design and implementation of Human-Machine Collaboration, also known as Joint Cognitive Systems, using techniques from both cognitive engineering and software engineering to develop this new breed of capabilities in decision support systems.

Where the problem of information overload is present, the cognitive approach in the Human-Machine Collaboration paradigm is the solution.