Integrating geospatial decision support into C2 decision making

摘要

A map is easy to understand and central to the planning and execution of any military campaign, but limited in the help it can give command and control when the situation is changing quickly in time and space. Computer-based tools can help the decision-making process but require expertise and familiarity that are not commonly available. Geospatial decision support (GDS) greatly assists the relatively unskilled in using geographical information systems to enable symbolic representations of data to be combined with maps so that exploratory questions can be answered interactively and quickly. The paper describes GDS and illustrates its value with a case study taken from a real conflict where the overriding question was where to place field guns in a mountainous region when finding trajectories that were unimpeded by intervening terrain was not straightforward. The rapid and successful software development rested heavily on close interactions between the designer, the decision maker and the system.