Architecture for Decision Aid Development and Deployment (AD3)

The network centric nature of the future force will allow unprecedented levels of coordination, distributed situation awareness, and distributed decision-making. However, decision-makers must be able to manage the masses of data available to them to maintain situation awareness and make the right decision at the right time. To help them, decision aiding tools will be required. Deploying decision aids throughout the future force presents engineering challenges due to differences in types of information, information resolution, and form factor requirements. To enable developers to deploy decision aids that meet the requirements of each unique application, we propose to develop an Architecture for Decision Aid Development and Deployment (AD3), a software architecture allowing developers to build decision-aiding interfaces, regardless of information or form factor requirements, by: 1) using a component-based architecture promoting re-use and extension of functionality; 2) including a library of components encapsulating communication protocols with external systems, algorithms to handle computational needs of decision aids, and HCI widgets to provide an interface with the end user; 3) incorporating a graphical agent builder allowing developers to create and configure decision aids with minimal added programming; and finally 4) including a graphical interface builder allowing developers to create integrated decision aid interfaces.