Motivation The technology that forms such an important part of the modern military is growing increasingly complex and configurable. At the same time, there is a drive to reduce the number of personnel that is required to operate this technology. For example, on a modern warship, there are myriad ways in which the onboard computer networking and sensor arrays can be configured, and different choices serve the various information needs of users with differing effectiveness. Thus, it is growing increasingly unreasonable to expect the available operators of the technology to always have a complete enough understanding of it to be able to quickly configure it to provide the best performance with respect to the unfolding situation. This untenable state of affairs is one that our technology can address.

Solution A computer system must be available upon which simulations of the complex military technology can be run. Many pairs of configurations and situations may be simulated – long in advance, shortly before some particular anticipated engagement, or in immediate response to reported events. The performance of each configuration in the relevant situations is determined by this large-scale simulation, which can be completed rapidly through the use of distributed computing. Now, the operator can be presented with the tradeoffs between the dimensions of the complex technology's performance and may choose among them, without having to understand anything about how the performance comes about through choice of the configuration settings. With technology that can accept new configuration settings through electronic transmission, our application can then transmit the new configuration settings, improving performance accordingly.

Benefits The military is increasingly dependent upon technological systems of many parts that can interact in many ways. Many different choices of performance can emerge from such systems, but the need to reduce personnel levels and optimize training time means that it is infeasible to assume that operators understand these complex systems well enough to accurately configure them to best address the current situation. Aetion offers a way to avoid this difficulty by offering operators the option of configuring military technology solely by performance needs when there is not time for personnel to investigate which configurations will work and why.