Decision Science Challenges for C2 Agility
Abstract
In recent decades, decision-makers in many areas, ranging from defense to weather forecasting, have argued that problems could be solved if more data were available. But merely increasing the volume of data gathered has not led to the hoped-for success. On the contrary, it has done just the opposite by overloading systems, networks, and, most importantly, human operators. Such factors not only jeopardize decision-making effectiveness, but also the adaptive capacities needed to assure the resilience of the decision-making process itself. New methods are needed to help decision-makers deal with the overwhelming amount of data being made available to them. In military Command and Control (C2), this challenge is intensified due to the diversity of data produced by multiple sources, the variety of information needing attention, and the time pressures that are a natural consequence of operations. In this paper, we consider strategic interdisciplinary research needed to produce transformational decision science capabilities for Warfighters at all levels across the Department of Defense (DOD). Our focus is on the needs of the human operator(s) who must rely on a variety of technologies to collect, interpret, and assimilate meaning from a variety of inputs in a complex and time-constrained environment. Toward that end we explore fundamentals of decision making and identify research challenges in the areas of human-machine collaborative sensemaking, task-relevant valuation and selection of information, and performance metrics for decision making at a genuine systems level. We conclude with a discussion of emerging military technologies that are designed to improve decision making in military domains and consider future trajectories that harness the power and opportunities provided by extremely large and disparate data.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2014
- Accession Number
- ADA607969
Entities
People
- Elizabeth Bowman
- Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
- Niranjan Suri
- Robert R. Hoffman
Organizations
- United States Army Research Laboratory