Decision Support Aiding for Human-Systems Acquisition

Frontier Technology, Inc (FTI) received a contract award to provide the Navy with cost estimating and decision support.

This research is applicable to the Department of Defense and commercial industries using complex, expensive systems such as multi-million dollar radar, command and control, aircraft, vehicle, and ship systems. As Navy organizations such as the Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Integrated Weapon Systems (IWS) and PEO Ships make decisions as to how much money to invest in new ship technologies versus sustainment of older systems, additional insight is needed to understand how different investments will impact human systems integration (HSI) activities, and how these in turn will impact overall weapon system performance and total ownership costs.

The same is true as advanced technology is integrated into legacy, maintenance systems. Not only do Navy program offices need to determine the level of resources necessary to acquire and operate such systems, but contractors developing these systems are also in need of analysis tools that can provide this insight. FTI is leveraging decision support infrastructure that was initially developed for Missile Defense and the Air Force. Tailoring this infrastructure will allow users to understand what HSI measures are appropriate, and which parameters impact the return on investment, resulting in saving millions of dollars by ensuring the appropriate and necessary data is included in early system trades, and user interface optimization once systems are in development.