The paper describes the use of an Intelligent Decision-aiding Agent (IDA) associate for management of distributed aviation assets during warfighter net-centric operations. VELOXITI, Inc. (formerly Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc.), is collaborating with government personnel to demonstrate and evaluate a Situational Awareness Fusion Enhancement (SAFE) Aid in a man-in-the-loop experimentation environment as part of an Aviation Development Directorate - Applied Aviation Technology Directorate (ADD-AATD) Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) project. Last year's Phase I focus was on defining the requirements for integrating a collaborative adaptive tasking system (CATS) into a full mission simulation environment. This year's efforts have grown into the SAFE Aid Intelligent Decision-Aiding Associate (IDA) system which incorporates a platform agnostic Intelligent Associate System for scout/attack/utility helicopters, and which will be integrated, demonstrated and evaluated in an operationally relevant man-in-the-loop simulation environment. SAFE Aid is intended to dramatically increase situational awareness within the cockpit and allow the ability to identify and access multiple Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets with a single bezel button to automatically task manned and unmanned assets. This tasking is based upon prioritization of Area of Operations (AO) events that optimizes all Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets to cover high priority events in the AO. SAFE Aid also enables aircrew safe route planning functionality, collision avoidance, predictive aircraft positioning, over the horizon weather updates, and many other operationally relevant functionality for scout/reconnaissance/attack/utility helicopter missions including MEDEVAC support. This paper will show the development, integration, demonstration and evaluation of the SAFE Aid technology that reduces aircrew workload and enables aircrews to effectively manage and utilize distributed aviation assets, without impairing their operational performance on other flight tasks. Aircrews will fly operationally relevant mission vignettes in a laboratory simulation environment with SAFE Aid operating and without SAFE Aid operating. Data collection and analysis of aircrew responsiveness will assess the aircrew's ability to optimize interaction between manned and unmanned aircraft within a relevant mission context environment. Mission safety will be demonstrated using the ability for the system to incorporate additional knowledge bases adapted to accommodate evolving Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs). Mission demonstrations will involve multiple aircrews operating in two simultaneous mission simulation environments. Operational effectiveness and situational awareness requirements will consider data and user interfaces, real-time performance and human interaction issues. These defined requirements will aid in documenting the evaluation criteria for the SAFE Aid IDA. Evaluation criteria consider collection and analysis of the measurements for both a simulator-based environment and for full flight environments. The ultimate goal is to identify IDA benefits for aircrew members when the SAFE Aid system is operating, as compared to when the system is not operating, and the impact this has on operationally relevant mission scenario success.
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