Improve the Effectiveness of the Decision-Maker Orientation Processes in Making Sense of the Events & Phenomena Presented by the Battlespace
Authors
Godin, Arkady A.
Subjects
aircraft activity
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast
ADS-B
Automatic Information System
AIS
patterns of life
POL
maritime vessel activity
western North Pacific
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast
ADS-B
Automatic Information System
AIS
patterns of life
POL
maritime vessel activity
western North Pacific
Advisors
Date of Issue
2019-10-31
Date
Publisher
Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
Planning, conducting, and assessing national security operations involves understanding and predicting the activities of adversaries and other subjects of interest. Many of these activities are strongly impacted by environmental conditions—for example, atmospheric temperature, winds, and precipitation; ocean waves and currents; seasonal and anomalous variations in these conditions. We assessed the potential to identify predictive relationships between environmental conditions and the activities of subjects of interest, and used those relationships to produce forecasts of the activities. Our assessment used: (a) environmental data from atmospheric and oceanic reanalysis; (b) maritime vessel activity data from the Automatic Information System (AIS); and (c) aircraft activity data from the Automatic Dependent SurveillanceBroadcast (ADS-B) data set. The data was primarily for the western North Pacific region during 20142019. This research developed and tested methods for processing the data and rapidly identifying spatial and temporal patterns, focusing on those that: (a) identify predictive relationships between environmental conditions and activities; (b) describe characteristic relationships for representing patterns of life (POL) for the vessels and aircraft; and (c) identify non-characteristic or anomalous activities. In doing so, we assessed how these relationships could be used to build models that would receive forecasts of environmental conditions as inputs to the models and produce predictions of vessel and aircraft activities as outputs from the models. These predictions, if skillful, would be useful in planning, conducting, and assessing a wide range of security operations. A major goal of our study was to develop and test potential methods for improving battlespace decision-making—in particular, the observation and orientation phases of the observe, orient, decide, and act (OODA) decision cycle or loop. The data is well suited for POL and predictive analyses, but there are several significant challenges in working with the activity data and related metadata. These include difficulties in: (a) availability and cost for sufficient unclassified data; (b) storing and processing the very large data sets that are needed; and(c) putting the data into formats that facilitate rapid real-time analyses.
Type
Report
Description
NPS NRP Executive Summary
Series/Report No
Naval Research Program (NRP) Project Documents
Department
Information Sciences (IS)
Organization
Naval Research Program (NRP)
Graduate School of Operational and Information Sciences (GSOIS)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC)
U.S. Fleet Forces Command (USFF)
U.S. Fleet Forces Command (USFF)
Funding
This research is supported by funding from the Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Research Program (PE 0605853N/2098). https://nps.edu/nrp
Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)
Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)
Format
Citation
Distribution Statement
Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.