Command Post of the Future

Last updated August 08, 2019

The United States Army's Command Post of the Future (CPOF) is a C2 software system that allows commanders to maintain topsight over the battlefield; collaborate with superiors, peers and subordinates over live data; and communicate their intent.

The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution. As the oldest and most senior branch of the U.S. military in order of precedence, the modern U.S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, which was formed to fight the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)—before the United States of America was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army. The United States Army considers itself descended from the Continental Army, and dates its institutional inception from the origin of that armed force in 1775.

Command and control or C2 is a "set of organizational and technical attributes and processes ... [that] employs human, physical, and information resources to solve problems and accomplish missions" to achieve the goals of an organization or enterprise, according to a 2015 definition by military scientists Marius Vassiliou, David S. Alberts and Jonathan R. Agre, The term often refers to a military system.

Originally a DARPA technology demonstration, in 2006 CPOF became an Army Program of Record. It is managed by the Product Manager Tactical Mission Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and integrated with the Army's Maneuver Control System and other products.^[1] The prime contractor on the CPOF program is General Dynamics C4 Systems, which purchased the original developer of the software (MAYA Viz Ltd) in 2005.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) is a United States Army facility located adjacent to Aberdeen, Maryland. Part of the facility is a census-designated place (CDP), which had a population of 3,116 at the 2000 census, and 2,093 at the 2010 census. There are 11 major commands among the tenant units, including

Maryland is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east. The state's largest city is Baltimore, and its capital is Annapolis. Among its occasional nicknames are Old Line State, the Free State, and the Chesapeake Bay State. It is named after the English queen Henrietta Maria, known in England as Queen Mary, who was the wife of King Charles I.

Overview

CPOF began as a DARPA investigation to improve mission command using networked information visualization systems, with the goal of doubling the speed and quality of command decisions. The system was developed in a research setting by Global Infotek, Inc.; ISX Corporation (now part of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories); Oculus Info, Inc. (now called Uncharted Software Inc.); SYS Technologies, Inc.; and MAYA Viz (now part of General Dynamics C4 Systems) with the active participation of military personnel as subject matter experts.

Information visualization study of visual representations of data

Information visualization or information visualisation is the study of (interactive) visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition. The abstract data include both numerical and non-numerical data, such as text and geographic information. However, information visualization differs from scientific visualization: "it's infovis [information visualization] when the spatial representation is chosen, and it's scivis [scientific visualization] when the spatial representation is given".

CPOF is one of several examples of collaborative software, but intended specifically for use in a mission command. A shared workspace is the main interface, in which every interface element in CPOF is a shared piece of data in a networked repository. Shared visual elements in CPOF include iconic representations of hard data, such as units, events, and tasks; visualization frameworks such as maps or schedule charts on which those icons appear; and brush-marks, ink-strokes, highlighting, notes and other annotation.

Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people involved in a common task to achieve their goals. One of the earliest definitions of collaborative software is "intentional group processes plus software to support them".

All visual elements in CPOF are interactive via drag-and-drop gestures. Users can drag data-elements and annotation from any visualization framework into any other (i.e., from a chart to a table), which reveal different data-attributes in context depending on the visualization used. Most data-elements can be grouped and nested via drag-and-drop to form associations that remain with the data in all of its views. Drag-and-drop composition on live visualizations is CPOF's primary mechanism for editing data values, such as locations on a map or tasks on a schedule (for example, moving an event-icon on a map changes the lat/lon values of that event in the shared repository; moving a task icon on a schedule changes its time-based values in the shared repository). The results of editing gestures are conveyed in real-time to all observers and users of a visualization; when one user moves an event on a map, for example, that event-icon moves on all maps and shared views, such that all users see its new location immediately. Data inputs from warfighters are conveyed to all collaborators as the "natural" result of a drop-gesture in-situ, requiring no explicit publishing mechanism.

CPOF is also used as a live-data alternative to PowerPoint briefings. During a CPOF briefing, commanders can drill into any data element in a high-level view to see details on demand, and view outliers or other elements of interest in different visual contexts without switching applications. Annotations and editing-gestures made during briefings become part of the shared repository. The commander's topsight is based on ground-truth at the moment of the briefing; the commander can then communicate intent on live data.

CPOF users at any level can assemble workspaces out of smaller tool-and-appliance primitives, allowing members of a collaborating group to organize their workflows according to their needs, without affecting or disrupting the views of other users. CPOF's Tool-and-appliance primitives are designed to let users create quick, throw-away mini-applications to meet their needs in-situ, supporting on-the-fly uses of the software that no developer or designer could have anticipated.

The CPOF software is based on the CoMotion platform, a proprietary commercial framework for building collaborative information visualization systems and domain-independent "decision communities". CoMotion's design principles originated as a research program at Carnegie Mellon University led by Steven Roth, and was subsequently developed at MAYA Viz Ltd and General Dynamics C4 Systems.

The CoMotion platform is a commercial product from General Dynamics C4 Systems that provides a synchronous and asynchronous collaborative workspace enabling data sharing, data visualization, and messaging. It allows potentially hundreds of users to collaborate live, sharing all or part of their persistent workspace and all data contained therein. It is the core platform for the Army's Command Post of the Future, USTRANSCOM's TransViz software, and Array BioPharma's Discovery product. CoMotion builds substantially on earlier work developed at Carnegie Mellon University, MAYA Design Inc., and DARPA.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. With its main campus located 3 miles (5 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon has grown into an international university with over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley, and more than 20 research partnerships.

Operational details

CPOF uses a proprietary navigational style database based on U-forms to store, represent, and operate upon a wide variety of types of data. CPOF can receive real-time or near-real-time data from a variety of standard sources—such as GCCS-A, C2PC, and ABCS—and display them using MIL-STD-2525B symbols on maps and charts. Plans, schedules, notes, briefings, and other battle-related information can be composed and shared between warfighters. All maps, charts, pasteboards, and other work products can be marked up with permanent and/or fading ink, and annotated with text or "stickies" to provide further context. A VOIP solution is included, although it can integrate with a pre-existing voice solution.

Fault tolerance for low bandwidth, high latency, and/or error-prone TCP/IP networks is supported by CPOF's multi-tiered client-server architecture. It can thus be deployed on systems from a two-hop geosynchronous satellite link to a radio network such as JNN while remaining collaborative. The software is largely Java-based, but is only currently deployed on a Microsoft Windows platform.

Deployment

CPOF was first deployed operationally in a handful of locations in Baghdad, Iraq by the 1st Cavalry Division of the US Army in 2004, and was subsequently deployed throughout Iraq and Afghanistan and used by coalition forces. Variants of CPOF have participated in United States Joint Forces Command's Urban Resolve 2015, the United States Air Force's Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment 06 and 08, and has been in use by the Marines in Combat Operation Centers since 2007.

CPOF became an official US Army program of record in 2006.

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References

↑ Davidson, Josh (2007-03-19), Col. Greene: We're trying to change culture , retrieved 2008-07-14

2. Jacob Mowry, Lead Trainer

External links

General Dynamics Mission Systems Command Post of the Future (CPOF)

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[1] Davidson, Josh (2007-03-19), Col. Greene: We're trying to change culture , retrieved 2008-07-14