Tracking Resource Allocation Cognitive Strategies for Strike Planning

Current procedures in the planning of Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) strikes in the United States Navy require an operator (the Strike Coordinator) to match available missiles to preplanned missions. Such strike planning is essentially manual, with little help from any computerized tool or decision-support system. This causes high workload for the Strike Coordinator, and drastically increases the probability of error and degraded assignments in the matching process. Research in the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT is investigating a potential decision-support system aimed at helping Strike Coordinators increase both their efficiency in the matching of missiles to missions, and the quality of the resulting assignments. This paper presents a recent experiment where actual U.S. naval operators tested different prototypes of automated decision-support interfaces for TLAM strike planning. Of primary interest was examining the different cognitive strategies used by the subjects in order to complete the assignment process. To this effect, we developed a visualization tool, TRACS (Tracking Resource Allocation Cognitive Strategies). TRACS captures the different cognitive steps the subjects visited while attempting to solve the resource allocation problems. Interesting findings are presented and discussed.