Neya Systems has been awarded a 30 month, $1.75M (with options) award from the Office of Naval Research Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems Program division (Code 321) to develop decision aids and mission planning tools for mine countermeasures.
Under this effort, Neya is developing a system design under a 6-month base period, with options to develop a high TRL prototype over the following 24 months. The design focuses on tools for mission planning, mission scheduling and evaluation, and water space management. Based on Neya’s Mission Planning and Management System (MPMS), the tools developed under this program will allow staff-level counter mine mission planners to rapidly develop long term plans for multiple heterogeneous manned and unmanned platforms, using techniques and terminology already familiar to the Mission Commander.
“Staff-level mine countermeasure mission planning is currently a highly manual task, with few planning tools and decision aids to help the mission commander,” said Dr. Parag Batavia, PI on the effort. “Our MCAT effort hopes to provide the insight and analytical tools needed to ensure that threat areas can be rapidly addressed and mitigated.”
Under the options on this effort, Neya will develop full implementations of the tools, and test their performance and efficiency through wargaming scenarios. The tools will be developed to allow multiple echelons of the mine counter-measure command to participate in the mission planning process. This allows domain knowledge and mission planning information to be gathered throughout the chain of command to generate actionable plans that can be carried out by available MCM assets. The tools will also be capable of ingesting data collected during mission execution in order to provide re-planning suggestions based on observed mine threats, new enemy intelligence, and changing environmental factors.