Proactive Contextual Decision Support for Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Current decision tools often omit important situational context. Unfortunately, this can lead to dangerous and costly errors, as context drives decision making. For example, in operational navigation planning tasks, decisions must be made that rely on multiple information sources of different fidelities and uncertainties. Furthermore, after obtaining additional information the necessity for replanning adds time pressure. The deluge of decontextualized and fragmented information leads to suboptimal decisions made reactively rather than proactively. This proposal addresses these issues by pairing PSEs specialty in designing scientifically principled interfaces to support challenging cognitive and collaborative tasks, with the expertise of Georgia Tech in the cognitive science of context in decision making. This proposal builds upon our Phase I work, and focuses on the creation of decision support elements that integrate context into decision tools for navigation planning and re-planning tasks. Critically, rather than the indiscriminate addition of context to current decision tools, we will utilize current decision science research to incorporate context into decision systems in a scientifically principled, intelligent, and effective way. Our proposal outlines the steps needed to combine current research with practice to create concepts that support Navy operational decision-making through the effective and appropriate integration of context.