Human Performance: Command Decision Making Program

This research thrust addresses theories, models and technologies to enhance the decision making skills of military commanders and their staffs. The goals are to improve situation assessment, option generation, response selection, resource allocation, quality and timeliness of decision making across all echelons of a battle group and task force component commanders. This program thrust focuses on developing a principled basis for the design of flexible command and control systems.

Commanders and their staffs must deal with a variety of task environments that change rapidly in response to changes in the battle rhythm, threat conditions and uncertain contingencies. Military operations are increasingly knowledge driven, mediated by four structures: the command structure, the information structure, the communication structure and the resource structure. New adversaries and rapidly changing, high-tempo and ambiguous environments require flexible and adaptive decision support tools to engage the dynamic task environment without losing mission effectiveness, speed and efficiency. This research thrust supports the achievement of Sea Power 21 and FORCEnet goals concerning human centric design, decision support systems for distributed decision making, and agile and adaptive command and control. The major research themes are:

• Cognitive models of individual and distributed decision making and collaboration
• Examining the role of context in applied decision making
• The study of Decision making in uncertainty
• Developing Proactive Decision Support tools for military command and control
• Model-based experiments and field trials with emphasis on decision processes in scalable maritime operation centers