A methodology to build a knowledge-based support system for tactical decision making

As the scope of duties shifts towards out of area missions in mixed environments, navies' future command and control systems must meet the specific requirements of such operations. Especially in the anti-air warfare (AAW) domain rapidly changing situations in combination with ambiguous data impose high mental workload on human decision makers. Thus the importance of supporting them increases significantly. The paper starts with a general description of this problem and points out two fundamental components to make up a support system. The first component is to ease system usage (i.e., enhance human-machine interaction) by means of visualization and interaction techniques. The second component, which main focus is put upon here, shall assist operators' cognitive decision making processes. Potentially applicable technologies like Boolean inference, fuzzy systems, Bayesian belief networks, and case-based reasoning are described in some detail and evaluated on the basis of a human information processing model. To become able to operate At technologies fruitfully it is necessary to acquire, describe, formalize, and represent the appropriate expert knowledge. To acquire knowledge empirically a laboratory test bed has been developed. Its structure and the planned experiments, to be undertaken with practiced AAW operators, are introduced finally.