The Collaborative Decision Environment (CDE)

The Collaborative Decision Environment (CDE) is a decision support tool for distributed mission planning, situational awareness, and data product visualization. It was developed for the Western States Fire Mission (WSFM) conducted by the Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership project. The CDE is part of a system that includes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an advanced multi-spectral sensor and satellite communications, which delivers near real-time fire data products to fire incident management teams. The initial design of the CDE adapted the Collaborative Information Portal software architecture used for the Mars Exploration Rover mission to meet WSFM requirements. During later development, Google Earth was selected as the primary visualization component because of its ease of use, 3-dimensional visualization, multiple operating system support, and easy conversion of WSFM data products into Google Earth’s KML format. The CDE in Google Earth is a set of graphical data layers of fire incidents, weather, airspace constraints, and mission specific data that are retrieved from servers at NASA and other agencies. The sensor data products, thermal imagery and heat polygons, were converted into KML format to view in Google Earth. Similarly, the UAV’s position data is displayed in Google Earth to provide situational awareness of the aircraft during the mission. Since most users outside of the mission planning team do not require viewing all the CDE layers, a “CDE-lite” version was created to display only the aircraft state and data products for the current mission. A web notification service was implemented to alert subscribers when sensor data products were available to download from an FTP server. The data products were also available as image maps from a web map server. A streaming video broadcast from the aircraft cameras provided users with additional real time situational awareness. Usage of the CDE in Google Earth increased steadily since it was first demonstrated in 2006, reaching an average of 150 users during the southern California missions in October 2007. While minor improvements were made after each mission based on user feedback, the lessons learned during the 2007 missions are guiding planned enhancements.