System Characteristics and Contextual Constraints for Future Fighter Decision Support

Research on decision support systems for fighter aircraft has to regard future manned and unmanned cooperating aircraft. This paper highlights system characteristics and contextual constraints to guide research as well as system development. Long term trends have been identified for the domain that has to be coped with, including the transformation of the fighter pilot from pilot to tactical decision maker. Automation strategies have to be developed to support manned and unmanned aircraft in a joint cognitive system. For instance, for intelligent fighter pilot support, for distributed unmanned and manned decision making, function allocation has to be concerned. For function allocation it is important not only to regard which agent is best at performing a task but also to regard the risk/cost of performing a task in this kind of potentially hazardous context.