Research Summaries

Back Distributed Common Ground System - Navy (DCGS-N) and Cloud Computing: De-stovepiping Information to the Warfighter

Fiscal Year 2015
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Unrein, Louis T.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary DCGS-N, a program of record with SPAWAR PMW-120, is an intelligence/information fusion, analysis and battlespace awareness tool. It supports Navy battlespace awareness, command and control and targeting. Increment 1 was fielded to various large deck ships and shore nodes, and Increment 2 is in development.
To deliver what the Fleet needs for rapid, incisive decision superiority, DCGS-N must employ cloud computing technologies. Information required about a given contact, target or entity will often come from raw sensors or databases external to the ship, watch center or headquarters, across a variety of DoD and Intelligence Community (IC) organizations. This research project will identify and study intelligence workflows and approaches to enabling DCGS-N access to the various flavors of information relevant to operations - signals intelligence, geospatial/imagery intelligence, human intelligence, acoustic intelligence, weather and bathymetric data, etc. Research will examine current solutions or propose new solutions to breaking down information stovepipes, allowing efficient fusion of data, knowledge, and analysis through the use of cloud technologies, and confront the challenges of maintaining battlespace awareness in a communications denied or degraded environment. It will also examine approaches for structuring the information/intelligence menu associated with an item of interest according to users' mission-specific requirements, thereby culling out superfluous information that a user may not need in favor of what is immediately relevant and useful to the mission(s) at hand.
The desired endstate for DCGS-N, from a user's perspective, is a system that can produce the full scope of tailorable and intuitive reference and current information about adversaries and the operational environment, and even auto-generate Course of Action alternatives and recommendations, via Machine-to-Machine interfaces with humans on the loop. This will free the user from mundane fact-finding and permit more human attention on pattern identification and recognition, prediction, anticipation, and incisive knowledge of adversaries and the battlespace. Research questions below include input from the DCGS-N Program Officer, PMW-120. Deliverables will be theses, point papers, and briefings, with study findings and recommendations to N2/N6 and the DCGS-N program office.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal