Sponsor:

AFRL

Research Team:

Edward A. Pohl, Raymond R. Hill, Laura Militello

Universities Involved:

University of Arkansas

Start Date:

12/01/05

End Date:

09/30/06

Summary:

The goal of this project is to identify approaches to assist military planners in anticipating and responding to potential CBR attacks with an emphasis towards impacts on the logistics process.
The focus of this research effort is to extend the reach of existing logistics modeling and simulation tools so they can assist in the decision making and coordination of the needs of logistics teams in a crisis action/planning mode. Specifically, the focus will be on the defense logistics decision process associated with a CBR threat scenario at the base and theater level. Existing logistics modeling tools and techniques will be examined to see if they provide the necessary foundation to support theatre level resource visibility as well as rapid planning and replanning for allocating, reallocating, tracking and moving logistics assets in a CBR environment. These methods must promote rapid, accurate, and coordinated efforts of logisticians in marshalling necessary resources for initial and follow on response to a CBR incident. This effort will be unique in that it will focus not only on the tools, but the users as well. Specifically, techniques for providing effective planning support to dispersed teams operating through networked infospheres will developed and evaluated. These communication and collaboration technologies will be explored in concert with the modeling and simulation tools in order to improve the speed and quality of the decisions. The research will explore the human/network interaction in an integrated way so as to maximize the collaboration potential for the distributed teams that operate in this environment.