Supporting threat evaluation through visual analytics

Abstract

Threat evaluation is concerned with estimating the level of threat posed by enemy units to one's own assets. This is an impact analysis problem which is important to address for supporting operators in achieving situation awareness. Due to the risky and complex nature of the threat evaluation tasks, it is imperative that the operators are supported by computerized systems as well as that they are an integral part of the threat evaluation process. To do so, the operators have to understand and be able to provide their input to the process, hence the need to make the threat evaluation process transparent to the operators. In order to implement a transparent threat evaluation support system, we argue that the process of visual analytics should provide valuable guidance. In this paper we suggest a model for using visual analytics in a threat evaluation context. We also investigate the potential of recognized threat evaluation models to be used within a visual analytics context.