Campaign assessment visualisation techniques for command teams

Command and control operations depend heavily on the interpretation, processing and conveying of large amounts of data. This often results in command personnel becoming overloaded with information. Currently, no adequate visualisation tool exists to support command teams in situation assessment and facilitate their selection of appropriate courses of action. This research is being conducted in response to this identified gap between technology and the human operator. It aims to understand the psychological processes underlying campaign planning and situation assessment. It then seeks to develop appropriate visualisations to support them. By understanding the processes underlying campaign planning and situation assessment, it may be possible to design the most appropriate visualisation techniques to support users´ mental models. It is hypothesised that visualisation techniques will result in decision dominance via improved campaign assessment. Additionally, they will provide the ability to react more rapidly to dynamic operational environments by shortening the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop. This research is relevant to other command centres interested in information visualisation for teams involved in complex system control