The power of collaborative systems
The power of collaborative systems
Superior performance of units in the diversity and intensiveness of today’s military missions will depend on the optimal constitution of teams for specific missions and tasks. To be fully effective, these teams will have to contain the proper mix of personnel in terms of their skills, experience and teamwork attributes. New knowledge and new tools will be needed as well to enhance commanders’ and command groups’ ability to constitute such teams. This is because it is highly complicated and difficult to allocate personnel optimally to teams, taking into account all of the mission and task requirements, the team roles, the individual capabilities of candidate members and the overall projected team performance capabilities. It is possible to improve existing teams and form optimal new teams automatically by: (1) building on the results of team performance research to derive a new framework for team composition that includes all the relevant factors; and (2) employing modern technology, such as Perceptronics Solutions’ new Automated Team Composition System (ATCS), to automatically score potential team effectiveness and allow the formation of optimal teams. The new framework is necessary because the requirements on today’s teams in the new netcentric environment are considerably different from those on traditional teams. The automated approach is important because it can exceed human analytical capabilities by making use of all the available data and can explore a tremendous number of potential team-member combinations in a short amount of time. Users working interactively with the ATCS can gain valuable insights into the various factors that affect optimal time composition, and can rapidly find new team members or form entirely new teams better than either humans or computers can do alone.
Our primary SBIR project objective is to develop a more complete framework that incorporates basic research knowledge to optimize team composition; this will be the focus of our Phase II effort. A second objective is to extend and test the framework by means of an adaptive, multiagent-based system that will automatically form and adaptively improve optimal teams using information on team performance factors available from standard personnel sources and/or brief questionnaires. We developed and tested a proof-of-concept version of the Automated Team Composition System during Phase I of the present SBIR project. We have subsequently implemented a complete prototype system under a closely related DARPA sponsored SBIR Phase II project focused on team formation using mission modeling and social networking factors. The availability of the DARPA prototype automated team formation system will greatly enhance our ability to perform the research necessary to develop and evaluate the complete team composition framework and will permit us to concentrate our Phase II efforts on the research tasks.
Home | About Us | Projects | News & Events | Papers | Contact Us
© 2007, Perceptronics Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. | Web Site Design by Capital Idea Ventures, Inc.
