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* Home > Defence  > Solutions for Defence > Command and Intelligence > Decision Making > ECHOS - Extended Command Hierarchy Operational Support tool *
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ECHOS - Extended Command Hierarchy Operational Support tool

With more and more information available to the commander and less time to react as the tempo of operations increases, any help in decision-making that automation can offer improves military effect. QinetiQ is deeply involved in developing decision support tools which are designed to enhance, not replace, judgement.

Decision support tools help to reduce the commander's workload as they assist in finding information, combine disparate types of information, present it in the best way, and offer possible courses of action.

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ECHOS Extenable Architecture. The integration mechanism provides retrospective interoperability, which enables the use of legacy applications; therefore, maximising return on previous investement ECHOS
QinetiQ has developed tools that truly meet the needs of military planners for many years. Under the maritime research programme QinetiQ conducted detailed research into what features make up a good planning tool. They also looked at how tools could be developed to support planners who work together to create plans, but are not in the same location as one another – “Distributed Collaborative Planning”.
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This led to the development of a research prototype tool which was explored in a number of experiments.

From this, QinetiQ designed and built the flexible and dynamic Extended Command Hierarchy Operational Support (ECHOS) demonstrator, which is a distributed collaborative planning framework. It provides a common infrastructure for task scheduling and resourcing in which all planners share the same view of the mission plan as a whole, and through which any planners, anywhere on the force network, can be rapidly brought together to create or repair plans.

ECHOS maintains the plan in a distributed environment allowing all
planners to subscribe to the same single plan representation. Whenever a change is made to any part of the plan, the subscribers’ view is updated immediately.
Planners can collaborate to create, maintain and repair plans in an
environment that automatically checks proposed alterations for consistency and determine the full impact of any change on the other parts of the plan.

ECHOS has a simple open interface that enables the ready integration of any other decision support and planning tools. This ensures that the capability can be extended to support any planning domain without the necessity to modify the core framework.

ECHOS is designed to be independent of any single system, allowing it to be used in conjunction with a range of information sources. The integration mechanism provides retrospective interoperability, which enables the use of legacy applications; therefore, maximising return on previous investment.
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Related sections
> Decision Making
> Agile C2
> Site Planning Tool
> Human Factors
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