Decision support software for Anti-Submarine warfare mission planning within a dynamic environmental context

Abstract

Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) involves effective allocation and path planning of ASW platforms to search for, detect, classify, track and prosecute hostile submarines within an evolving environment. As the environmental context evolves rapidly, continuously collected Meteorological and Oceanographic (METOC) data is used for assessing the impact of the current and forecasted environment on individual sensors and weapon platforms, as well as on tactics in the form of performance surfaces, which is presented to the commanders in making go/no-go decisions. However, due to the overwhelming amount of METOC information, it is very challenging for the commanders to interpret and analyze the data for generating plans or evaluating courses of action in a timely manner. In this paper, motivated by the need to assist ASW commanders in making proactive decisions in an evolving environmental context, we present a decision support tool for modeling and incorporating the appropriate METOC information from multiple sources and further utilizing it to determine the search regions and optimal trajectories to search for and track the enemy submarines in a timely manner.