The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Charles River Analytics Inc., a developer of advanced technologies for intelligent system solutions, a contract to support DARPA’s Resilient Command and Control (RC2) program. RC2 seeks to enable situational awareness of command and control (C2) mission systems, as well as provide insight into the mission-related impact of changes in C2 system health and status. RC2 also aims to provide context-aware and adaptive re-planning solutions to maximize C2 systems support of on-going missions. As part of this effort, Charles River is developing a suite of services, Situation Awareness Modeling and Analysis Services for C2 Systems (SAMAS), which will use innovative probabilistic reasoning methods to assess C2 system status, and forecast future C2 capability. SAMAS will also provide intuitive human-on-the-loop visualization tools so that the command staff will understand these status assessments and forecasts. The multi-year contract is valued at $5.5 million.
“Under the SAMAS program, we will develop, maintain, and continuously improve a common model of the C2 system to describe C2 assets, their operational characteristics, the topology of their interconnections, and the inherent uncertainty in each of these features,” explained Mr. Sean Guarino, Senior Software Engineer at Charles River. “SAMAS will use probabilistic techniques to analyze C2 system health and status, as well as stress-test potentially critical C2 system vulnerabilities and cascading effects. SAMAS will then present the results of this analysis in intuitive interfaces that guide the command staff through complex analysis and model improvement.”
Charles River has supported DARPA for over a decade in areas such as human computer interaction, situation assessment, predictive analysis, collaboration-support systems, and dynamic real-time operating systems. Dr. Jonathan Pfautz, Vice President of Cognitive Systems, added: “We are very excited about the opportunity to contribute to the RC2 program. We are looking forward to working with DARPA and our exceptional teammates at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Referentia Systems Incorporated to provide innovative technologies that will help command staff to better understand their C2 infrastructure and the impact of losses within that infrastructure, whether those losses are due to an enemy attack, accident, natural phenomena, or even inappropriately scheduled maintenance.”
This material is based upon work supported by the United States Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
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