School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering

This project was funded by the Systems Engineering for Autonomous Systems (SEAS) Defence Technology Centre, established by the UK Ministry of Defence and focused primarily on the context of decision making relationships inter and intra different groupings of military operators and the range of autonomous or semi-autonomous systems at their disposal.

The primary aims of this project were to investigate the effects of culture on the effectiveness of systems including the implications for organisational forms and decision making structures, and to create prototype tools that demonstrated the feasibility of collecting the cultural traits of mission resources, comparing them to mission requirements and highlighting incompatibilities; an additional aim was to evaluate alternative system architectures against mission requirements. The target end-users of the final versions of the tools are mission planners who are required to put together a system (comprising human and technical components) to carry out an operational requirement in a particular environment. For example, one question it might help to answer: ‘Is a particular configuration of military assets tasked with carrying out a mission, capable of demonstrating appropriate decision-making, information processing, communication, adaptive skills and behaviour in an environment where the command style is control free, authority is delegated, operational tempo is unpredictable and the battlespace is ill-defined?’

BAE Systems was the lead industrial partner, providing the project with unlimited access to design review teams in three major programmes.