“ Decision Support Tool for Anti - Ship Missile Defence Operations

Naval combat platforms will increasingly operate in littoral environments where they will be exposed to a variety of anti-ship threats. To defend against these threats, a warship will use different means, including hard-kill weapons and soft-kill measures. Efficient allocation and coordination of these combat resources is a complex decision-making problem, where a huge amount of imperfect data must be dealt with, under the pressure of time. This defines the Combat Power Management (CPM) problem. Different studies have shown that experienced military operators are able to respond efficiently to multiple sequential threats; but in a situation involving massive and successive raids, their decisions tend to be suboptimal beyond a certain number of threats. In such situations, advanced CPM decision support capabilities are required. This paper present CORALS, a CPM capability that has been developed to support the ship command team in planning optimized responses to multiple threats. One key feature of CORALS is its ability to provide different and significant decision-support capabilities ranging from optimizing deployment times for combat resources against single targets to the sophisticated coordination of combat resources for engagements involving multiple targets. The paper also discusses the Command Decision Support (CDS) lab, where CORALS is integrated.