Strike View
Summary
An application to support military planners in creating missions for Tomahawk missiles and visualizing the mission/missile matchings. Created for the MIT Human & Automations Lab, Vestal Design helped to refine the basic UI and created the visualization and artificial intelligence for the mission/missile matching.
Problem
Originally the Human & Automations Lab had Strike View built by an outside contractor. However, after they failed to deliver a usable UI, Vestal Design’s Technology Director was hired as a researcher to refine the interface and create the functionality for visually and optimally assigning missile to missions. The primarily goals of the interface were to allow planners to easily create and modify missions, and then easily visualize how to optimally match missiles and missions. For any mission there are nine critical variables to consider when assigning a missile. Coupled with identification information, the primary problem of matching was how to effectively represent the vast quantity of information and interaction between variables. This was a classical example of visualizing and interacting with a multi-variable optimization problem. In addition, Vestal Design had to design and implement an artificial intelligence algorithm to produce an optimal solution which the human’s solution could be compared against.
Approach
Designed under a Navy research grant, the application had to conform to standard military design standards for terminology and graphics. In this case, graphic design was consider superfluous to the goals of the project. Instead, attention was focused on how to allow users to intuitively interact with the map displaying missions in the main interface. For the missile/mission matching, it was previously decided that the interface would be constrained to basic tables and bar graphs (more advanced UIs are now being investigated as the topic of a Ph.D. thesis), but advanced user assistance could be implemented, as well as how the table was displayed. All users of the application were considered to be expert users which would make errors due to habitual experience (akin to the bathtub curb found in Human Factors Engineering studies of airline pilot error rates).
Solution
In the main interface, the map display was extensively modified. Users could now drag and drop with any of the elements within the map. Additionally, relevant information was displayed upon mousing over the symbol. A movable legend was added, as were coordinate ticks and grids. The ability to visualize the flight to the center of an area of interest (AOI) was implemented to allow users to quickly identify optimal locations to place loiter waypoints (where a missile could circle until given further commands regarding emerging targets). Although graphic design was not part of the project, the graphics of the map display were enhanced for comprehensibility.
The mission to missile matching interface was designed using custom rendered tables and bar graphs. A basic color scheme was employed for each row which corresponded to previous assignments, variable matches between a missile and multiple missions (or vice-versa) and if any matches were possible. Also, lists of targets and missiles were displayed to alert users to targets or missiles with sparse solution spaces or no solution space. Since the overall goal is optimize target coverage by priority, a relative bar graph display was used to give planners an overview of the current solution metrics.
