Math and Computer Science Colloquium – Nov. 10

U.S. Army Use of Mathematics Models and Computer Science

The Mathematics and Computer Science Department is pleased to present a colloquium by Daniel Parsons and U.S. Army Major John H. Panzer III on Thursday, Nov. 10, from 4-5 p.m. in the Murphy-McPhee Auditorium in Westerman Hall. They will discuss programs of research in the United States Army that use techniques from mathematics, statistics, data science, and computer science. Cookies will be available. At the end will be a recruitment pitch for opportunities for civilian undergraduates, such as research internships. Here are summaries of the talks:

Applying Experimental Design with Modeling and Simulation to support Analysis of Alternatives:

Modeling and simulation efforts are used often used to develop the operational and performance requirements of combat systems. The Future Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) ecosystem is a proposed Army aviation program composed of a helicopter, drone, and missile that enables the Army to counter enemy air defense systems. This program was recently modeled using the Advanced Warfighting Simulations (AWARS), a Corps/Division level analytic combat simulation operated by the Research and Analysis Center. Parametric operational analysis through use of efficient DOE provides a robust methodology to identify relative operational impact and importance within a given scenario or system without relying on specific alternative definitions or data. Recent studies have employed fractional factorial designs and nearly orthogonal Latin hypercubes(NOLH). NOLH provides a robust methodology for FARA analysis to examine the full design space for interested attributes and interactions while minimizing correlation bias from inputs and tremendously reduces the required number of experiments to efficiently investigate the design space using statistical analysis.

Operational Impacts of Modernization Decisions:

Army Senior Leaders must balance financial and operational risk when making acquisition decisions across multiple portfolios. The operations research challenges was to develop a way to measure the operational benefit of dissimilar programs, across portfolios, across echelons from their employment across the battlefield in different theaters in order to inform operational risk of trades. The TRade-space And Decision Exploration Tool (TRADES) allows leaders to conduct cross-portfolio trades and compare dissimilar programs using a repeatable and defendable process. Operational benefit measures and informs the value of modernizing a program compared to current capabilities and to other modernization efforts. Model algorithms use the change in value as a program’s return on investment and apportion benefit by measure to evaluate the operational risk of trades. Army Senior Leaders (ASLs) use modernization ‘levers’ to assess the operational impact of trades to two theaters and their measures (tasks). TRADES provides timely, evidence based, trade-space analysis products to inform the operational impacts of modernization decisions.