Proactive Decision Support

The purpose of this announcement is to focus attention of the scientific community on current warfighter decision making needs for Proactive Decision Support (PDS) tools, and the development of theories and models that would enable a science of Context-Driven Decision Making (CDDM). The Command Decision Making program (CDM) will pursue basic and applied research to develop algorithms, methods, techniques and strategies for modeling missions, tasks and operational context in order to dynamically anticipate a warfighters information needs, and then present information to enable the decision maker to make better decisions, faster than they would without PDS. The Command Decision Making (CDM) program is seeking to invest in basic and applied research that aims to mitigate the challenges faced by today's decision makers. The purpose of this topic is to identify, understand, and resolve key issues, develop and mature algorithms and methods; determine and demonstrate performance of algorithms, methods, techniques, and strategies for automated computational methods and information systems that support decision making. At the center of this new research initiative is the idea that existing or newly developed algorithms and applied to create a context awareness of decision makers' missions and tasks. Given dynamic algorithms of context that are sufficient to understand missions and tasks (i.e. goal driven behavior) it will then be possible to develop and demonstrate PDS tools that will anticipate the decision and information needs of decision makers. This will enable decision makers to effectively address operational complexity and make more optimal decisions, faster. The result of this effort will be algorithms, methods, techniques, and strategies that would be a basis for a Science of Context-Driven Decision Making (CDDM) and the development of practical Proactive Decision Support (PDS) tools. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is interested in receiving proposals for the CDM program. Proposals should address the requirements for science that would address the mechanisms for Context Driven Decision Making, and technologies that would enable the development of Proactive Decision Support tools. The general interest is in innovative science and technology to model/infer the user's decision making behavior, to enable a utility-based exploitation of information needed to support those decisions, as well as the active modeling of "decision trajectories " so as to provide time critical information supporting anticipated decisions. The active modeling of context related to tasks is expected to be a significant research problem that will contribute to the development of proactive decision support. It is expected that this research and development effort will demonstrate significant operational impact on the achievement of mission objectives and goals.