Simulation and Wargaming

13Visualization Support to Strategic Decision‐Making

Richard J. Haberlin and Ernest H. Page

The MITRE Corporation, McLean, Virginia, USA

Introduction

Government agencies are facing unprecedented pressure on their budgets and increased demand for justification of their funding priorities. Across the Department of Defense (DoD) and broader government, organizations are challenged to understand the multifaceted impacts to cost, schedule, quality, and risk as limited resources are allocated to competing activities. A new approach and tools are needed to help leaders make informed decisions on resource allocation. Generally, decision support systems (DSS) provide decision‐makers (DMs) with information relevant to a particular decision in an easily ingestible presentation. This chapter introduces a novel DSS solution – Interactive and Immersive Visualization (I2V) [1] – that transforms raw data into multilayered informative visualizations while also enabling real‐time course of action (COA) analysis.

The traditional role of visualization in wargaming is primarily supportive in nature. It facilitates communication of results and comprehension of the underlying model behavior to strengthen confidence in representation of the domain. However, faster computing and lightweight software have opened new opportunities for a more interactive role in wargame execution through customization of an interactive layer that allows the user to transform wargaming analytics into collaborative decision‐making ...