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Visible Battle Rhythm 2006 CCRTS THE STATE OF THE ART AND THE STATE OF THE PRACTICE Visible Battle Rhythm Topics: C2 Concepts and Organizations, C2 Experimentation, C2 Architecture Brian Cort 1, Alain Bouchard 2, Denis Gouin 2, Pascale Proulx 1, William Wright 1 1: Oculus Info Inc. Berkeley Castle 2 Berkeley Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON, M5A 4J5, Canada Telephone: (416) 203-3003 x225 Fax: (416) 203-0646 2: Defence R&D Canada Valcartier 2459 Pie-XI Boulevard, North Val-Bélair, QC, G3J 1X5, Canada Point of Contact: Brian Cort [email protected] Abstract Battle rhythms are ubiquitous in military operations, but current methods for implementing them have not kept pace with the changes affecting military organizations. Visual Battle Rhythm (VBR) is a software prototype which updates the battle rhythm process with modern technology and careful information design to improve the synchronization, situational awareness and decision making ability of commanders. Key improvements over current methods include faster coordination across commands crucial for joint and coalition operations, easy distributed editing capabilities, instantaneous updates and saved time. VBR was demonstrated at Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (JWID) 2004 and exercised by the Canadian Joint Operations Group (JOG). Training required less than one hour and in both cases it received excellent evaluations. This paper describes the context and use of VBR and its potential as a deployed operational system. 1. Introduction A battle rhythm is a ‘process where the commander and his staff synchronize the daily operating tempo within the planning, decision, execution and assessment (PDE&A) cycle to allow the commander to make timely decisions’ [4]. Battle rhythms are ubiquitous in military operations, but current methods for implementing them have not kept pace with the changes affecting military organizations and technologies. 2. Project Background and Context In order to improve situational awareness and coalition common operating picture (COP) the US, Canada, UK and Australia formed Coalition CINC 21 (C-CINC 21). Recognizing the importance of information design and presentation, Visualization Services is one of the six focus areas of C-CINC 21. [5]. Canada’s contribution to C-CINC 21 was the Common Operational Picture 21st Century Technology Demonstration (COP 21 TD). One of the information visualization projects undertaken was the enhancement of VBR. 2.1. Need for Improved Battle Rhythm The trend towards Network Centric Warfare (NCW) principles in order to maintain information superiority is effecting major changes in military command and control. The tempo of operations and need for rapid response is increasing, command is being dispersed across geographic locations, and decision making is being pushed down the command hierarchy. All of these changes require improved situational awareness and remote collaboration abilities throughout the military organization in order to be successful [1, 8]. Further, as joint and coalition operations become more common, the need to coordinate across commands and with allies is becoming more prominent. Combined with the movement to effects-based and stability operations, collaborations are extending beyond the military to other government agencies and civilian non- governmental organizations (NGO’s). These coalitions often form rapidly as situations develop, demanding tools that can integrate heterogeneous systems on an ad-hoc basis [2]. Traditional paper-based systems, or their slightly more modern PowerPoint offspring, do not meet these challenges. 2.2. Current systems and tools Before commencing work on VBR, structured interviews were held with commanders in order to understand their current working practices and requirements. Current systems tended to be static tables or charts, made in a software package such as PowerPoint, Word or Excel, usually depicting a single day of operations. Charts typically consisted of timelines with key daily events anchored to them in callout boxes. These documents were created and revised by a single designated document owner and then emailed, printed or presented at briefings. Depending on the complexity and rate of change of the schedule, it is not uncommon for revising the schedule graphics to be a fulltime job for a staff member. Oculus Info Inc. 2006 1 Figure 1: Existing battle rhythms tend to be difficult to read, maintain and distribute. When discussing commanders’ wishes for what a new battle rhythm tool should provide, a number of key points were raised repeatedly: “Battle Rhythm is the most significant thing you do … the trick is to marry the cycles.” “The ability to synchronize BR with other commands would be very helpful, particularly if collaboration is necessary.” “The Commander has four or five hard points each day … and needs to see interdependencies.” “Excellence in BR is marked by flexibility, adaptability of BR." “Many of the current frustrations with BR derive from its static nature. If it were more dynamic, particularly if tied to decision points and CCIRs, it would be used more often.” “Allow variable display arrangements so that different users could reconfigure the BR to suit their preferences and needs.” 2.3. Design Criteria and Goals These structured interviews formed the basis for the establishment of design criteria and issues to address: Increased information availability: improved situational awareness is dependent on users having access to more and better quality information in a useful format; Improved information understanding and decision making: careful information visualization design can greatly increase the amount of the information that users are able to assimilate and act upon, while reducing operator errors; Dynamic/“live” documents: information must be continuously editable and updatable to reflect the current situation; Oculus Info Inc. 2006 2 Coordination across levels of command: for all operations, and especially joint and coalition operations, tight synchronization among separate command and control hierarchies must be provided; Multiple timeframes: a single 24 hour timeframe is insufficient for commands distributed across multiple time zones and for operations that extend over many days. The old manual edit templates and update frequency should not limit the time horizon visibility; Visible interdependencies: constraints must be made explicit, both within and between commands; Intuitive and easy to use: many staff complained of complex systems that tried to do too much (e.g. Microsoft Project), or the difficulty of trying to create schedules in tools not designed for the job, such as PowerPoint or Excel. Acceptance of the software depends on it being fast and easy to use. Joint operations and crisis situations can involve non-routine users of VBR who must be able to pick up the tool and be productive without time for training; Distributed access: users need access to situational awareness information from wherever they are; this includes multiple fixed sites, as well as in the field; Reconfigurable: coalition and third-party information must be easily incorporated; Open standards infrastructure: the software must rely on open standards that will allow easy integration with current and future systems. Most of these criteria are the direct result of moving the standard battle rhythm into the context of NCW. Top-down creation/distribution of single-command battle rhythms fail to provide the common operating picture necessary for operating in a networked environment or joint operations. Live documents allow all commands to see changes immediately and respond and adapt by updating their own rhythms appropriately. Modern joint and coalition operations further extend coordination requirements, creating a need to incorporate information on an ad-hoc basis and extend the system through intuitive integration points. Animated computer graphics can be extremely expressive. With the correct approach to the visual design of the layout and the objects, large amounts of information can be quickly and easily comprehended by a human observer. Visualization is an external mental aid that enhances cognitive abilities [3]. When information is presented visually, efficient innate human capabilities can be used to perceive and process data. Orders of magnitude more information can be seen and understood in a few minutes. Information visualization techniques amplify cognition by increasing human mental resources, reducing search times, improving recognition of patterns, increasing inference making, and increasing monitoring scope [3, 10]. These benefits translate into system and task related performance factors, for individuals and groups, which affect the completion of analysis, decision-making and communication tasks. The time, effort and number of work products required to do these types of tasks are reduced [11]. An important goal for VBR was to employ the advantages of visualization to achieve an order of magnitude improvement over current Battle Rhythm tools and methods. 3. Related Work VBR uses the basic principles of Gantt chart design to organize events along a horizontal timeline. This layout is similar to well known project management software packages such as Microsoft Project, however the differences in application domains and usage scenarios result in very different tools. Kullberg’s Dynamic Timelines [6] explored using timelines in an interactive 3D space for viewing historical database information. Mackinlay et al. explored a number of
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