SBIR/STTR Award attributes
The following will reflect needs within the Information Technology category that touch primarily on decision support, processing, exploitation, reasoning and intelligence. The Air Staff of AF/A1M and Air Force Manpower Analysis Agency is collaborating with SparkCognition via a SBIR phase 1 and II to tailor our decision support tool to their current five use cases (attached in Volume 5). Air Staff officials have shared that future conflicts may require decisions to be made within hours, minutes, or potentially seconds compared with the current multiday process to analyze the operating environment and issue commands. A1M have also stated that the department’s existing command and control architecture to relay manpower requitements are insufficient to meet the demands of the National Defense Strategy. The Joint All Domain Operations (JADC2) program will exponentially increase the amount of data needed to analyze, and share in real-time that provides a fuller picture of the operating environment to a C2. Though data driven decision making is a priority for AF/A1, collecting and analyzing data has gone beyond their capabilities and analysts are currently overwhelmed by the task of accessing, compiling, analyzing, and distilling this material into useful, actionable, decision-quality information for forward thinking decision making. Current challenges are manual interactions with functional and organization communities, laborious data collection, entry, and analysis. Furthermore, repeated manual development and population of manpower models delivered via spreadsheet on weapons system manpower “what-if” scenarios.
