The U.S. Army needed to improve its battlefield communications in order to facilitate faster decision-making. Its command and control practice involved manually mapping coordinates—requiring an advanced understanding of the surrounding geography, and countless minutes of back-and-forth radio communication. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) teamed up with MAYA and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to develop a tool that would improve the speed and quality of command decisions.
Client:
Products & Services
Analysis & Insight
The MAYA team figured out that technology in the command post was not being used to its full capacity because the current information systems did not support collaborative decision-making. Our team then prototyped solutions that incorporated a data visualization tool to reduce time and keep the information exchange easy and consistent. The resulting Command Post of the Future (CPOF) gave soldiers a visualization of real-time battlefield information in which they can identify trends, correlations, and outliers to give them a strategic advantage during operations. It offered multiple ways to view information, allowing soldiers to view data in a timeline, graph, or map or collaborate by sharing their view with other users. CPOF’s intuitive design has been an integral tool of the U.S. Army since 2005.
increase in missions planned and executed
increase in situational awareness
CPOF reduces training time from 14 days to 1 day
