Course of action scoring and collaboration

The military today is looking at ways to increase both the number of courses of action (COA) evaluated to address a particular scenario as well as expanding the scope of those possible COAs to achieve the desired results while incurring the least possible negative effects. In expanding the set of evaluated COAs, collaborative decision making becomes critical in selecting a COA to implement from all of the possible and often disparate COAs. The Course of Action Simulation Analysis (CASA) task was created to address some of the issues involved with collaborative decision making for COA selection, specifically metrics identification, data representation, and scoring approaches. This paper introduces concepts behind CASA with a focus on the scoring methodologies and capabilities developed during the CASA prototyping effort, as well as addressing the collaboration issues that play in COA selection and that CASA research.