Cognitive Support for Transportation Planners: A Collaborative Course of Action Exploration Tool

Abstract : To planners at United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), a course of action (COA) is a transportation plan - a description of what vehicles, routes, and ports should be used to move sets of cargo and passengers throughout the world. A planner may be tasked with very quickly producing multiple COA options at any time in response to either real or projected needs. The current procedure relies heavily on planner experience and "back-of-the-envelope" computations to find feasible options for quickly moving cargo and people in a resource-constrained environment. This paper describes a rapid COA exploration tool, uniquely designed around the cognitive workflow of experienced planners, to allow a planner to quickly and effortlessly investigate multiple potential plans. Map-based tools allow the planner to directly assess the usability of multiple ports, to evaluate the throughput over designated route segments, and finally to analyze the throughput across an entire COA. We designed this tool to seamlessly invoke calculations while planners naturally conduct COA decision making activities in the tool. Modifiable calculation assumptions are made explicit to the user at each step along the way, thus opening the entire COA exploration process to shared awareness and collaboration between multiple planners, each an expert in different areas.