Planning and Assessing Effects Based Operations (ebo)

Effects Based Operations (EBO) analysis tools are important in assisting the analyst in determining whether or not a Course of Action (COA) will meet the stated Commander’s intent and whether it is having negative, unintended consequences. Currently, assessment efforts are focused more on combat effects, than they are on overall campaign effects. In addition, current COA Analysis tools are limited in their ability to integrate effects across domains – from power to water, or gas to transportation for example. In this paper, we describe an open architecture EBO assessment capability that may be used in either a planning role or as a real-time operations assessment tool to address the needs described above. Our research is based on SPARTA’s modeling framework the Net-Centric Effects-based operations MOdel (NEMO). NEMO treats the opponent’s infrastructures as a system of networks representing the critical domains, such as electrical power, telecommunications, transportation, gas, water using ‘Best-of-Breed’ industry standard simulations. NEMO also uses Net-Centric enterprise service approaches (e.g., discovery, messaging, software agents, Geospatial Information System (GIS) Shape files and is built using the Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit (CJMTK)) to capture and model the relationships between various parts of these networks that represent their real-world interdependencies.