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Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are crucial for securing critical infrastructure (CI) against cyber-attacks, yet little is known about how public and private organizations develop willingness to partner for CI cybersecurity. This research addressed this gap through a qualitative, multiple-case analysis of four PPPs related to cybersecurity, each involving two organizations and an additional, follow-up PPP. The research developed a process model that challenges the conventional view of willingness as fixed or static and proposes a new perspective that captures the process of constructing willingness. The research highlights the usefulness of activity theory in exploring this concept and presents the process model that describes this new understanding of willingness. Constructing willingness to partner is an activity path commencing with a catalyst that prompts relational partnering activities and generates partnering frames of emulation, insight, and connection, along with emerging commitments. These commitments generate intangible partnering resources including competence, reputation, and social capital, which support the construction of willingness to partner. The activity path comprises three subprocesses: initiating interaction, generating commitment, and legitimizing partnering. This research enhances the literature on PPPs and CI cybersecurity by offering a detailed description of how public and private organizations construct willingness to partner., Chief Warrant Officer Four, United States Army, Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

A poster, summarizing an NPS Masters Thesis on this topic. This thesis explores the feasibility of using ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) to help clean the air aboard US Navy ships. Recent airborne related infections on Naval vessels, including the COVID-19 outbreak aboard a United States aircraft carrier, highlight the need to improve disinfection techniques used aboard naval vessels. Application of 200-280nm wavelength UVC light to the ship's heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) system in using specific exposure profiles makes inactivation and termination of airborne pathogens possible. Research has shown that UVGI is also successful at destroying biological warfare agents such as anthrax. Proper implementation of UVGI within a ship's ventilation system and in-room spaces can achieve high disinfection rates of airborne pathogens, reduce airborne-related illnesses, and increase operational availability. Commercial maritime employment of UVGI is also instructive. Recommendations included completing a multi-disciplinary design effort to install commercial-based prototypes on naval ships.

Blockchain is highly adaptable and enables distributed transaction logging through its cryptographic underpinnings, making it an attractive technology for diverse suppliers and acquisition integrators. Supply chain tracking using blockchain must, however, support updates to item records throughout the life cycle—including repair and carcass tracking within Depot Level Repairable (DLR) and back into operation. Unmanned systems, additive manufacturing of parts, and version-control of software updates are all exemplars related to the supply chain requiring addition, deletion, updating, and mergence of a wide array of records. This raises the question of how to build and integrate an integrity-protected item history record that is updateable regardless of when or where changes may occur. We call this approach to updateable record management blockchain mergence and investigate how item tracking can be achieved throughout the full item life cycle, even under intermittent connectivity of deployed assets in combat environments. We demonstrate blockchain mergence through an interweaving of dual chains—an authenticated local history signature chain and a global blockchain—and apply it to an unmanned aerial system repair case. Blockchain mergence offers significant opportunities for distributed decentralized trust among diverse producers and consumers of both materiel and information, ashore and afloat.

Distributed ledger technology such as blockchain could ideally be used to solve challenges in global supply chain assurance. In blockchain, consensus is achieved among active concurrent participants. The chain is, by design, required to be a single forward-building path of events; if branches appear, the chain consensus ensures that all but one branch is discarded. A supply chain in comparison, particularly on the production side, is a reversed architecture. In this case, small parts are used to build larger parts, hence requiring blockchain mergence (e.g., a final ready-for-use vehicle is comprised of multiple smaller parts sourced from various vendors, manufacturers, and even countries). Thus, the current capabilities of blockchain do not meet the fundamental demands of supply chains. Assuring supply chain integrity and visibility requires an adaptation of the technology to allow a form of blockchain mergence that the original concept was not designed to handle. This research looks at a possible solution among hash chains, blockchain, and ledger options for supply chain strategy.

Distributed ledger technology such as blockchain could ideally be used to solve challenges in global supply chain assurance. In blockchain, consensus is achieved among active concurrent participants. The chain is, by design, required to be a single forward-building path of events; if branches appear, the chain consensus ensures that all but one branch is discarded. A supply chain in comparison, particularly on the production side, is a reversed architecture. In this case, small parts are used to build larger parts, hence requiring blockchain mergence (e.g., a final ready-for-use vehicle is comprised of multiple smaller parts sourced from various vendors, manufacturers, and even countries). Thus, the current capabilities of blockchain do not meet the fundamental demands of supply chains. Assuring supply chain integrity and visibility requires an adaptation of the technology to allow a form of blockchain mergence that the original concept was not designed to handle. This research looks at a possible solution among hash chains, blockchain, and ledger options for supply chain strategy.

Implementing the DoN 30-Year R&D Plan: Creating and Sustaining a Culture That Values Learning, Strategic Agility, Collaboration and Innovation

Enhance Warfighter Performance by Fostering Organizational Agility & Innovation in the Naval Research and Development Enterprise

Implementing the DoN 30-Year R&D Plan: Creating and Sustaining a Culture That Values Learning, Strategic Agility, Collaboration and Innovation

Enhance Warfighter Performance by Fostering Organizational Agility & Innovation in the Naval Research and Development Enterprise

SPIDERS3D is a Web-based virtual environment (VE) for global Naval collaboration that has the potential to work well for U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and maritime operational planning as well. It is an open‐source open-standards system with no licensing restrictions or fees. Three-dimensional (3D) models can be adapted from any source and then annotated with metadata, archivally saved, and composed together within shared VEs using the Extensible 3D (X3D) International Standard. X3D is similar to (and compatible with) regular Web pages published in HTML. We are using SPIDERS3D to examine notional scenarios where a developmental Extra Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (XLUUV) might get underway from a mixed-use port, thus requiring operational coordination with USCG. Collaboration insights and questions for SPIDERS3D visualization are many. What port preparations are necessary? How can such vehicles be safely launched, recovered, driven or towed? How can diver safety and support be properly planned? How can a harbor pilot provide guidance to operators during port transit? What bathymetry, tide and ocean-current constraints influence and affect deployment? How do USCG assets coordinate operational support with Navy vessels? What are the governing nautical Rules of the Road for each stage of the transit, from pierside through constrained harbor all the way to open ocean? How can we connect further to civilian maritime resources for harbor operations? Looking even further ahead, how might SPIDERS3D vignettes illustrate future-design explorations for USCG EVERGREEN? Many opportunities for Web-based visualization and collaboration at all levels are now becoming possible. Feedback and insights are welcome.

Project Summary: Navy leaders are concerned about the impact of accelerating rates of change on the Navy's effectiveness. They want to foster a culture of learning, collaboration, and innovation to increase lethality. The Department of Navy's (DoN) Thirty Year R&D Plan proposes a strategy to increase our technological advantage & maritime superiority in an increasingly dynamic security environment. The Naval Research and Development (R&D) Enterprise (NRDE) is integral to expanding the Navy's technical capability and assuring military advantages now and in the future. We hypothesize that optimally positioned communities of interest (COIs) can act as a driving force in accelerating organizational culture change. We explored enabling factors to produce collaboration-based culture change and provided recommendations to improve the implementation of the R&D Plan. We developed practices to catalyze COI efforts to implement the R&D Plan as we explored ways leaders can implement a long-term strategy by fomenting and sustaining organizational culture change. We focused on discovery, discussion, fostering collaboration, and building connections across naval institutions. We concluded that changing culture requires aligning aspects of an organization to create an internal environment conducive to the desired changes. Leaders need to communicate the desired change and model the behaviors they want to instill. Creating a cross-organizational community requires cultivating opportunities that build interest, participation, and reward engagement in order to attract and retain participants. Communication platforms, forums, and educational opportunities need to be available to the COI. Informal systems require compatible rewards, often intrinsic, that enable people to be active participants who can promote and take pride in the desired changes.

Project Summary: Navy leaders are concerned about the impact of accelerating rates of change on the Navy's effectiveness. They want to foster a culture of learning, collaboration, and innovation to increase lethality. The Department of Navy's (DoN) Thirty Year R&D Plan proposes a strategy to increase our technological advantage & maritime superiority in an increasingly dynamic security environment. The Naval Research and Development (R&D) Enterprise (NRDE) is integral to expanding the Navy's technical capability and assuring military advantages now and in the future. We hypothesize that optimally positioned communities of interest (COIs) can act as a driving force in accelerating organizational culture change. We explored enabling factors to produce collaboration-based culture change and provided recommendations to improve the implementation of the R&D Plan. We developed practices to catalyze COI efforts to implement the R&D Plan as we explored ways leaders can implement a long-term strategy by fomenting and sustaining organizational culture change. We focused on discovery, discussion, fostering collaboration, and building connections across naval institutions. We concluded that changing culture requires aligning aspects of an organization to create an internal environment conducive to the desired changes. Leaders need to communicate the desired change and model the behaviors they want to instill. Creating a cross-organizational community requires cultivating opportunities that build interest, participation, and reward engagement in order to attract and retain participants. Communication platforms, forums, and educational opportunities need to be available to the COI. Informal systems require compatible rewards, often intrinsic, that enable people to be active participants who can promote and take pride in the desired changes.

Experts and practitioners have worked long and hard toward achieving functionally capable robots. While numerous areas of progress have been achieved, ethical control of unmanned systems meeting legal requirements has been elusive and problematic. Common conclusions that treat ethical robots as an always-amoral philosophical conundrum requiring undemonstrated morality-based artificial intelligence are simply not sensible or repeatable. Patterning after successful practice by human teams shows that precise mission definition and task execution using well-defined, syntactically valid vocabularies is a necessary first step. Addition of operational constraints enables humans to place limits on robot activities, even when operating at a distance under gapped communications. Semantic validation can then be provided by a Mission Execution Ontology to confirm that no logical or legal contradictions are present in mission orders. Thorough simulation, testing, and certification of qualified robot responses are necessary to build human authority and trust when directing ethical robot operations at a distance. Together these capabilities can provide safeguards for autonomous robots possessing the potential for lethal force. This approach appears to have broad usefulness for both civil and military application of unmanned systems at sea.

Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program

Additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D printing, is poised to change the world of military expeditionary operations. It has the potential to affect every element of military operations--logistics, training, simulation, and warfighting. However, these cutting-edge technologies are shifting so rapidly that the current military acquisition system is not prepared for their adoption on a large scale. Among the issues that need to be addressed are 3D watermarking of digital models, proper prints in a distributed system, security of a repository of 3D models, and on-site customization of existing models. The author performed an empirical study centered around a survey of United States Marine Corps (USMC) and United States Navy (USN) personnel. The objective was to determine which of the promising 3D technologies have been adopted in United States Marine Corps and United States Navy and which should (or should not) be adopted. The survey and thesis conclude that AM and Contour Crafting have a lasting place in future USMC and Navy operations. Adoption of AM in the USMC and USN is still rare, but most agree that it can be used to great effect. The thesis recommends that more studies be performed to determine the best way forward for AM within the USMC and USN.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology has a potential to affect and change everything in all services: logistics, repair, warfighting along with training, simulation, education and support. Additive Manufacturing (AM), 3D printing and CAD export are also critical for Navy maintenance. Rapid change continues to occur across the design, engineering, manufacturing, and production process - many products can now be fabricated using AM methods. Iterative design processes require close collaboration of all entities involved from design to production; with AM, the lines between these previously stovepipe steps become blurred. A need to design, test and adopt different maintenance workflow becomes a necessity in cases of preventive and corrective maintenance of mechanical components on Navy ships and aircrafts where such operations have major impact on operational readiness. This project proposed to study and test elements that were identified as critical for effective deployment of AM in Navy operations, with specific emphasis on maintenance operations, while remaining sensitive to other Navy domains and activities where the use of AM could bring significant value. Our overarching goal was to provide a comprehensive approach that would lead towards reduction of energy costs, as well as reduction of materials and human resources engaged in that process.

Additive Manufacturing (AM), 3D printing and CAD export are critical for Navy maintenance. Rapid change continues to occur across the design, engineering, manufacturing, and production process - many products can now be fabricated using AM methods. Iterative design processes require close collaboration of all entities involved from design to production; with AM, the lines between these previously stovepipe steps become blurred. A need to design, test and adopt different maintenance workflow becomes a necessity in cases of preventive and corrective maintenance of mechanical components on Navy ships and aircrafts where such operations have major impact on operational readiness. This project proposes to study and test elements that are identified as critical for effective deployment of AM in Navy operations, with specific emphasis on maintenance operations, while remaining sensitive to other Navy domains and activities where the use of AM could bring significant value. Our overarching goal is to provide a comprehensive approach that would lead towards reduction of energy costs, as well as reduction of materials and human resources engaged in that process.

Many types of robotic vehicles are increasingly utilized in both civilian and military maritime missions. Some amount of human supervision is typically present in such operations, thereby ensuring appropriate accountability in case of mission accidents or errors. However, there is growing interest in augmenting the degree of independence of such vehicles, up to and including full autonomy. A primary challenge in the face of reduced operator oversight is to maintain full human responsibility for ethical robot behavior. Informed by decades of direct involvement in both naval operations and unmanned systems research, this work proposes a new mathematical formalism that maintains human accountability at every level of robot mission planning and execution. This formalism is based on extending a fully general model for digital computation, known as a Turing machine. This extension, called a Mission Execution Automaton (MEA), allows communication with one or more “external agents” that interact with the physical world and respond to queries/commands from the MEA while observing human-defined ethical constraints. An important MEA feature is that it is language independent and results in mission definitions equally well suited to human or robot execution (or any arbitrary combination). Formal description logics are used to enforce mission structure and semantics, provide operator assurance of correct mission definition, and ensure suitability of a mission definition for execution by a specific vehicle, all prior to mission parsing and execution. Computer simulation examples show the value of such a Mission Execution Ontology (MEO). The flexibility of the MEA formalism is illustrated by application to a prototypical multiphase area search and sample mission. This paper presents an entirely new approach to achieving a practical and fully testable means for ethical mission definition and execution. This work demonstrates that ensuring ethical behavior during mission execution i

The robodata project is collecting telemetry and mission information from a wide variety of robots at the Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event being held at Camp Roberts, CA 8-11 August 2016. Project Website: https://my.nps.edu/web/robodata. Robodata Repository: https://robodata.ern.nps.edu. Reference: http://stoqs.mbari.org. JIFX 16-4: http://my.nps.edu/web/fx/jifx-live.

The motivation for pursuing XML-based tactical chat includes the great potential of this technology and fixing limitations of current chat programs. XTC capabilities have the potential to completely upgrade and restructure all tactical military communications. The current tools for military chat include VRC, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, and NKO. None of these provides the full functionality or interoperability needed in a joint environment. Moreover, if a nonproprietary chat protocol is developed, it can lead to a decision-support environment in which data, text, audio, and video can be logged, evaluated and managed, all in a Web environment where no additional specialized software or hardware is needed. Chat technology challenges for the military fit into three areas: tactical, technical and administrative. Tactically, there are many ways chat can be used, but effective practices are not yet defined in procedures or doctrine. Joint forces use a myriad of chat programs that don't interoperate and are usually proprietary. Technically many chat programs are barred by firewalls and lack a robust interface to allow logging and searching past chats, From an administrative prospective, plain-test chat has no structure. Scheduling and controlling who attends or converses remains undefined. Within DoD there is no standard for how, when, and by whom chats ought to be conducted. Possible approaches to these problems include adopting a proprietary chat system or customizing an open-source implementation. Proprietary solutions are costly, do not interoperate well, and are too inflexible for a technology that is evolving rapidly. Open-source software can provide a solution that is adaptable, extensible, quick to implement, straightforward to maintain, and relatively inexpensive. This report provides a preliminary assessment of XML-based tactical chat (XTC) using an open-source, open-standards solution. Promising initial results demonstrate that an XML document can be sent from an XHTML, Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Travel and active participation in ACM Web3D conference have been planned in support of major research activities on the project "CAD Interoperability for Navy Reuse in 3D Printing, Maintenance and Training."

Travel and field visits to Port Hueneme, San Diego and VR Hackathon have been planned in support of major research activities on the project "CAD Interoperability for Navy Reuse in 3D Printing, Maintenance and Training." Additional insights related to technology field were derived from the visit to Maker Faire and VR Hackathon (not supported by project), and were added to complement our growing knowledge about this domain.

Preventive and corrective maintenance of mechanical components on Navy ships and aircrafts is a complex task that can have major impacts on operational readiness. In situation when a component needs to be delivered to a remote team (an off shore installation or ship), the final cost of transit and delivery can be further exacerbated if newly received component is confirmed not to be adequate, leading to a new iteration of physical delivery. This results in extreme and unplanned costs of the overall mission. We propose to design and test maintenance workflow that utilize the emerging capabilities of novel technologies like 3D scanning, 3D printing and stereoscopic display, ensuring that only fully tested physical components will ever be shipped to remote unit. This process can be seen as a virtualization of corrective procedures, where instead of physical components, local and remote teams exchange a set of virtual artifacts, test mock-up objects and resort to final delivery only when they are sure the new component is a perfect fit. This delayed and in-time manufacturing and transit, fully supporting the concept of smart manufacturing grid, represent the essence of policy that has energy savings at its core. The benefits of this approach will be directly applicable to many other segments of DoD and civilian domains.

Additive Manufacturing (AM), 3D printing and CAD export are critical for Navy maintenance. Rapid change continues to occur across the design, engineering, manufacturing, and production process - many products can now be fabricated using AM methods. Iterative design processes require close collaboration of all entities involved from design to production; with AM, the lines between these previously stovepipe steps become blurred. A need to design, test and adopt different maintenance workflow becomes a necessity in cases of preventive and corrective maintenance of mechanical components on Navy ships and aircrafts where such operations have major impact on operational readiness. This project proposes to study and test elements that are identified as critical for effective deployment of AM in Navy operations, with specific emphasis on maintenance operations, while remaining sensitive to other Navy domains and activities where the use of AM could bring significant value. Our overarching goal is to provide a comprehensive approach that would lead towards reduction of energy costs, as well as reduction of materials and human resources engaged in that process.

Matlab is a powerful tool to compute high-fidelity engineering model and plot the result in figures. Simulink implements Matlab .m source code into block diagrams and flow charts to execute the simulation. This project demonstrates how physics equations implemented in Simulink can animate X3D or VRML models, along with the methods to convert Matlab .fig format into an X3D object so we can apply it into Web-based animations.

New capabilities in web browser JavaScript implementations including networking, improved graphics performance, and improved speed allow the implementation of Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) inside the web browser. An NVE can be written in JavaScript, which enables deployment in the enterprise entirely from a web server without the use of browser plugins. We discuss one implementation of this idea using X3DOM, an opensource implementation of the X3D standard written in JavaScript. The Open-DIS library for the IEEE Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) network protocol is used to create a partial implementation of the X3D standard’s DIS profile. Mechanisms for using the X3D DIS Profile DISEntityTypeMapping and DISEntityManager to enable run-time discovery and launching of new entities are discussed. Measurements of the capabilities and performance aspects of Websockets for network transport demonstrate excellent results.

The Extensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF) is defined as a composable set of standards, profiles and recommended practices for web-based modeling and simulation. Markup languages based on XML, Internet technologies, and Web services are combining to enable a new generation of distributed M&S applications to emerge, develop and interoperate. The purpose of this task is to develop the technical framework, coordinate with existing public standardization efforts, and demonstrate distributed exemplars of the developed framework. This report describes work accomplished in 2004 by the XMSF project team consisting of Naval Postgraduate School Modeling, Virtual Environments, and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, George Mason University (GMU), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and Old Dominion University/Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (ODU/VMASC). Principal areas of work included ongoing community education and development activities through conference and workshop participation, liaison with relevant standards organizations, and development of exemplar applications demonstrating the technical approaches and applicable standards relevant to XMSF precepts. The report proposes follow-on efforts for 2005, including continuation of current efforts and further standardization work with multicasting, web-enabled IEEE 1516 Run-Time Infrastructure, data modeling in C2 and M&S systems, and executable architectures., Defense Modeling and Simulation Office

Naval information dominance hinges on three fundamental capabilities: assured command and control (C2), battlespace awareness, and integrated fires. None of these are possible without effective communications links. Networks, and more specifically, the information flowing through them, are now a center of gravity for the Fleet. Maritime tactics and operational plans rely on levels of synchronization only possible through bandwidth communications.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute designed the Spatial Temporal Oceanographic Query System (STOQS) [MBARI 2014] to create new capabilities for scientists to gain insight from their data. STOQS employs open standards and is a 100% free and open source project. It includes a web-based graphical user interface where X3D Geospatial has been integrated to enable 3D geospatial data visualization.

Given that physics can be fundamental for realistic and interactive Web3D applications, a number of JavaScript versions of physics engines have been introduced during the past years. This paper presents the implementation of the rigid body physics component, as defined by the X3D specification, in the X3DOM environment, and the creation of dynamic 3D interactive worlds. We briefly review the state of the art in current technologies forWeb3D graphics, including HTML5, WebGL and X3D, and then explore the significance of physics engines in building realistic Web3D worlds. We include a comprehensive review of JavaScript physics engine libraries, and proceed to summarize the significance of our implementation while presenting in detail the methodology followed. The results obtained so far from our cross-browser experiments demonstrate that real-time interactive scenes with hundreds of rigid bodies can be constructed and operate with acceptable frame rates, while the allowing the user to maintain the scene control.

MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet) sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, is an online game platform designed to elicit collective intelligence from an engaged pool of world-wide players. In the past the Naval Postgraduate School hosted a series of successful games including piracyMMOWGLI (2011), energyMMOWGLI (2012) and biiMMOWGLI (2013) which built the critical mass of players needed to find creative solutions to real-life, difficult business problems such as piracy, energy and business innovation initiatives (bii). NPS also leveraged MMOWGLI with the analytic framework of Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) to link the game data to the concepts documented in two business processes (i.e. improve DoD energy efficiency and improve future open systems architecture [OSA] strategy]. We demonstrated the synergy of using both tools to gain faster viability of new ideas to improve the acquisition process, and sorted the idea cards that might be good candidates for further investigation. We then determined that the majority of Navy programs are affected by (or critically dependent on) energy issues but goals and terms are handled inconsistently. It is evident that MMOWGLI together with LLA is an important tool for comparing and considering innovative ideas using social media games to improve acquisition processes.

DoD energy inefficiency is a significant liability and a constraint on operations and a forceprotection challenge. It is therefore imperative to reduce energy demand and provide operational forces greater flexibility among alternative energy sources. However, the current acquisition processes undervalue technologies with the potential to improve energy efficiency. We report the results of leveraging an innovative platform, the Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) to link and elicit collective intelligence from the acquisition community for the challenge of DoD energy inefficiency. We first linked the existing MMOWGLI energy data with samples of acquisition data using lexical link analysis (LLA). We generated match matrices based on themes discovered in both data sets. The themes and match matrices helped identify the gaps and opportunities to apply collective intelligence from the MMOWGLI game to the current acquisition process. This effort demonstrates superb potential of an innovative methodology that can be deployed quickly to mobilize the intellectual capacities of the acquisition community. It may also increase the overall awareness of ongoing acquisition research to warfighters and create a positive impact for the future acquisition decisions to help achieve improved DoD energy efficiency., Except from the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium Logistics Management.

There are two goals for autonomous vehicle navigation planning: shortest path and safe path. These goals are often in conflict; path safety is more important. Safety of the autonomous vehicle's navigation is determined by the clearances between the vehicle and obstacles. Because a Voronoi boundary is the set of points locally maximizing the clearance from obstacles, safety is maximized on it. Therefore Voronoi Diagrams are suitable for motion planning of autonomous vehicles. We use the derivative of curvature k of the vehicle motion (dk/ds) as the only control variable for the vehicle where s is the length along the vehicle trajectory. Previous motion planning of the autonomous mobile robot Yamabico-11 at Naval Postgraduate School used a path tracking method. Before the mission began the vehicle was given a track to follow; motion planning consisted of calculating the point on the track closest to the vehicle and calculating dk/ ds then steering the vehicle to get onto track. We propose a method of planning safe motions of the vehicle to calculate optimal dk/ds at each point directly from the information of the world without calculating the track to follow. This safe navigation algorithm is fundamentally different from the path tracking using a path specification. Additionally motion planning is simpler and faster than the path tracking method. The effectiveness of this steering function for vehicle motion control is demonstrated by algorithmic simulation and by use on the autonomous mobile robot Yamabico 11 at the Naval Postgraduate School, http://archive.org/details/optimizingsafemo1094528432, Lieutenant Junior Grade, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

While the application of a time-step approach in modeling C4ISR in Missile Defense Warfare (MDW) suffers inaccurate time estimation and relative slow speed, Discrete Event Simulation (DES) can elegantly satisfy these shortages. However, current DES frameworks typically rely on detailed efforts in event analysis for numerous replications before software modification of the simulation scenario can be meaningful. Such approaches have limited adaptability, especially regarding flexibility of scenario design and customizability of entity definition. This dissertation proposes an improved DES framework, Adjustable and Extensible Modeling Framework DES (AEMF-DES), which embeds the primary principles of a topical theme into a program to perform adjustable and extensible studies that can be explored by the analyst. To prove the feasibility of AEMF-DES, a Missile-Defense Simulation application (MDSIM) is also developed during this research. MSDIM simulates the C4ISR processes in Missile Defense Warfare and can estimate the overall effectiveness of a defenders deployment or attackers strategy. Additionally, based on the interest in sensor deployment evaluation, a k-coverage rate problem is also studied. Current k-coverage algorithms can only deal with binary and omnidirectional sensor models which cannot provide enough simulation fidelity if higher resolution is needed. An improved k-coverage rate algorithm is proposed in this research to handle the probabilistic and directional sensor models. A separate simulation test successfully demonstrates the feasibility of this new calculation algorithm in estimation of the k-coverage rate problem with probabilistic and directional sensor models. Considered together, the architecture implemented in this example software illustrates the value of integrating hybrid simulation techniques to support C4ISR analysis related to Missile Defense Warfare.