User Needs Drive Air Space Cyber-User Defined Operational Picture

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  • By Brent Holmes
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ROME, New York --  The Air Force Research Laboratory's Air Space Cyber-User Defined Operational Picture (ASC-UDOP) program has embarked on a joint effort with MITRE and ESC to provide visualization solution to produce a Map the Mission capability for the Air Force's 624th Cyber Operations Center, San Antonio, Texas. This effort explores how to represent the cyber domain dependencies that mission assets have and how those dependencies impact overall mission effectiveness.

AFRL delivered a prototypical Map the Mission capability based on AFRL's in-house developed, JView-based, Joint Space Tasking Order Explorer (JSTO Explorer) which will allow MITRE to demonstrate its Map the Mission concept in September 2011 in San Antonio, Texas. This is an example of AFRL leveraging multiple in-house tools to create more robust applications for end-user demonstrations. ASC-UDOP brings to bear its ability to look at multiple, large datasets in order to visualize the cyber domain and provide a Cyber Situational Awareness capability for ESC and MITRE.

The ASC-UDOP program is an AFRL S&T RDT&E 6.3 budget activity funded critical experiment in response to a data call put out by AFCYBER (Provisional) for a visualization capability that is dynamic and reconfigurable (user-defined) and which could display large heterogeneous data sets. ASC-UDOP is built on the ACESViewer work done in cooperation with NASA and the FAA as part of the Airspace Concept and Evaluation System. It uses JView, an in-house developed graphical application programmer's interface as its rendering system.

The ASC-UDOP team spent time documenting the systems and data used in the Joint Interface Control Officer (JICO) cell at the 608th AOC in Barksdale, Louisiana, to address better ways of representing their data. In a remarkable demonstration of dynamic user-tailoring, immediately after speaking with the 608th's weather officer on how the UDOP technology could make the process of generating weather reports more efficient and accurate, a new visualization was composed to render a composite aircraft/weather display where the weather was abstracted into terms of aircraft state to show more non-conventional ways of representing the types of information in which the 608th is interested.

Finally, ASC-UDOP software was installed at the ISPAN program office EPL lab located at USSTRATCOM in Omaha, Neb. This collaboration spawned from technology exchange meetings between ISPAN program office and the AFRL's Information Directorate, looking for emerging technologies.