I spent a couple of hours yesterday viewing a hurricane disaster response experiment in Mitre’s Collaborative Experimentation Environment. The experiment was around the coordination of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) operations to support the missions of multiple agencies in response to a hurricane event. Agencies provided the operational experts that were run through several scenarios with various levels of technology support to evaluate the effectiveness of processes, interactions, and decision-making.
This was a good example of the use of experimentation to support multi-agency operations, and it was also instructive to the need for a backbone of continuous experimentation as a core strategy of achieving NextGen. The aviation system today and NextGen tomorrow will rely on expert operators interacting with each other, systems, and “systems of systems” to accomplish each organization’s mission. The policies, procedures, and systems we develop can not be considered independent of the human operator. The human operator brings skills, norms, decision-making styles, and innovative capacity to the table. Therefore, achieving a transformation like NextGen means engaging the people that operate the system on a continuous basis to ensure that the total system, including the human, gets the job done. Experimentation is a great way to ensure that engagement — so experimentation needs to be at the heart of NextGen development.
Bob Pearce
JPDO Deputy Director
Posted by myjpdo 
Posted by myjpdo 