Managing a Decision Making Situation in the Context of the Canadian Airspace Protection.

An important activity of the Air Operation Center (AOC) is the elaboration, mitigation and evaluation of different Courses of Actions (CoAs) in order to respond to emergency situations. Defense Research Establishment Valcartier (DREV) initiated a research activity to provide the AOC Commander and his senior staff, with advisory tools. The Commande's Advisory System for Airspace Protection (CASAP), a distributed and unsynchronized knowledge based decision support system, was then designed to help the AOC staff managing counter-drug events and their related CoAs. This C2 support system helps the Commander (or his representative) to screen and prioritize the proposed CoAs to overcome the emergency situation. CASAP uses multicriterion decision analysis (MCDA) concepts and models. A MCDA methodology was used for the knowledge engineering. This methodology was implemented in CASAP, with different add-ins to help the Decision-Maker analyzing the CoAs, and minimizing the risk component introduced by the subjectivity and the uncertainty of the evaluation process. In this paper, we review the modeling process of the decision-making situation, the formulation of the different criteria, and the aggregation procedure. We introduce also the analysis tools implemented in CASAP.