KTH / NADA / TCS / DSG / Research

Research

There are large uncertainties regarding how the civilian society needs to be protected in the future. The emphasis will be on threats that include terrorism, and environmental disasters, rather than on the large invasion that previously was considered the main issue. Flexibility is the keyword when dealing with situations that may be classified as being in between war and peace.

In protecting the society, decision-makers must be able to combine and utilize different kinds of resources to achieve the goals of a given task. Managing resources in the military case should hence be similar to dealing with civilian resources.

To solve tasks not known in advance, one ought to look for ways of planning and executing operations that do not depend on the actual kind of resources that will be used. The science of Command and Control, C2, shows promising possibilities to achieve such flexible and general methods. Further motivations for general C2 methods suitable for different situations include reduced costs for technical development and training, as well as faster and better decision-making.

Our research activities within the area of Decision Support aim to provide tools for C2 with solutions focusing on decision theory, data fusion, and knowledge representation. These tools include support for Situation Awareness and Information Quality (Arnborg et. al, 2000, Wallenius 2000, Wallenius 2000a, Bergman and Wallenius 2001), and Decision Analysis (Brynielsson and Granlund, 2001).

One specific contribution is the Game Environment for Command and Control Operations, GECCO, which is a generic platform for gaming. GECCO is provided to the research community as open source software (Brynielsson and Wallenius, 2001).