DNA gives transport planners more street smarts

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DNA gives transport planners more street smarts

By Caron Golden
Special to Defense Systems

Military planners are developing a project to get troop and supply convoys safely past obstacles such as improvised explosive devices and hurricanes and help them navigate past problems such as dirt roads too narrow for a Humvee.

Those planners can’t get the information they need on MapQuest or by checking the terrain on Google Earth. They must have an intelligent system that provides all information that they need to choose a route, build alternatives or backup plans, or calculate needed extra time.

That is the goal of the Distribution Network Analysis project, which recently completed the final stage of development. This system provides information about factors such as weather, road conditions, political issues and threats from criminals and terrorists.

The project began in 2005 when the Transportation Command’s Intelligence Directorate, or TC-J2, enlisted the help of the Joint Forces Command’s Joint Transformation Command-Intelligence. The plan was to enable end-to-end supply chain management by better understanding the worldwide distribution network, potential threats and the effects of those threats.

“When this experiment started, TC-J2 asked us to provide better intelligence support, but we needed to use ESRI ArcGIS, a standard commercial mapping tool that is well spread out across both the Department of Defense and the federal government,” said Justin Thurber, DNA project lead at JTC-I.

The team used a spiral experimentation approach with a total of four spirals. The last spiral, which looked at the effect of friendly forces on the distribution network, was conducted in June at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., where TC-J2 analysts provide the information to transporters, operators and planners.

Developing that information required the collaboration of partners, including TC-J2, JFCOM, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Surface Deployment and Distribution Command and Lockheed Martin, said Navy Cmdr. Michael Lents, European Command branch chief at TC-J2.

In this system, the data is provided in layers of information in a Web-based geospatial database. Each layer provides information to help planners identify attack trends, road suitability and weather threats.

For example, Thurber said, “in Iraq, if we wanted to move something from the Green Zone to Mosul, we would use the system to draw a line between them, and dots would represent [IEDs] found previously on the route or weather information or other kinds of data. The possibilities are endless and only limited by the analysts’ imagination.” Lents said the system is more than a beefed-up MapQuest. “It’s the whole interaction of the environment. It brings the mission and threats together to understand interactions so planners have information to work with to make their decisions, at which point they can get into what-if drills. That’s where the power of the construct is.”

Lents said it took a mind-set change to execute DNA. “We all recognize we have niches of expertise, but we need to bring together several niches of expertise to get this to make sense. To get a holistic answer, you have to reach out to different agencies and they have to learn to share information.”

Meanwhile, setting standards was another challenge. “Different agencies have different technical standards for data in general,” Lents said. “We’re trying to feed that process of standardizing the data with the help of the NGA. We need to be able to exchange data seamlessly.” As TC-J2 integrates with JFCOM, it is also looking to perform more process streamlining to make it easier to pull data and transfer it between systems.

And, with the multiuser geographic information systems database being deployed mid-October, TC-J2 is looking at how to automate basic scripting requirements to make the search process faster.

“DNA is not just a set of tools,” Lents said. “Yes, there’s a basic Web interface to get basic data, but this is enabling the dialogue. This tool builds data into a knowledge base so that planners can sit in a room and talk.”