Mission Planning Application for Submarine Operations and Risk Management

Sonalysts proposes to develop a Mission Planning-Evaluation Tool (MP-ET) to support submarine Commanding Officers"risk and operational assessment of mission plans. Our approach is to extend the current APB-13 Mission Planning Application (MPA) by using a fuzzy logic approach. This method enables encoding the heuristics used by experts into an automated, quantifiable evaluation of operational risk. Our approach is to use a simulation engine to run multiple trials of a course of action-scenario combination, and evaluate the output with a fuzzy logic engine. Our fuzzy logic rule set will be developed by interviewing current and former submarine Commanding Officers and reviewing relevant submarine grounding, collision, mission, and exercise reports. We will leverage or develop, as necessary, modular interfaces to the existing Mission Planning Application (MPA). Simulation outputs will be processed through a Fuzzy Logic (FL) engine to compute risk and effectiveness for presentation to a decision maker. We will develop an initial Risk Assessment Display, aimed at presenting risk elements, risk factors, and an aggregated risk timeline which will present FL output to the Commanding Officer. We will also examine the run-time feasibility of using a simulation engine for real-time evaluation of risk and effectiveness.