TLCA Case Studies

Project Hine
Project Hine (Phase 1) was a UK Ministry of Defence funded project which measured and assessed the actual in service performance of a variety of equipments and systems currently deployed across the land, seas and air domain. It specifically examined how such systems generate, manage and distribute geo-spatial and temporal information. (e.g. position and time)

The problem
In order to make informed decisions regarding the deployment and evolution of currently military capability there is a need to understand and assess currently deployed capability and the level of performance actually delivered. Such information not only provides assurance and confidence in the deployed capability but also allows potential limitations to be identified. There is therefore a need to assess the capability of currently deployed, in service equipment and systems.

It followed a number of lines of investigation, including the measurement and assessment of in-service capability to see if there was a problem with the way that geo-spatial and temporal information is typically handled and managed, the development of metrics, and further development of the toolsets needed to support these measurement activities. (including such tools as Oculus and GTIS).

Analysis approach
Data was collected at a number of points through variety of sensor-to-shooter error chains and the errors measured using ground truth provided by SAMT. Specialised new metrics were developed and implemented in tools such as Oculus to measure such things as misalignment of reference frames across a force and error estimate accuracy. Graphical visualisation techniques where then employed (again using systems such as GTIS and Oculus) ,to give the customer a clear and intuitive understanding of the issues.

Benefits
Measurement of in service equipment and systems not only provides confidence in, and assurance of, the actual deployed military capability but also understanding the behaviour of errors as geospatial and temporal information passes through a network allows limitations and priorities areas to be identified. Similarly such measurements allow any resulting improvements to be quantified. The processes and tools available within QinetiQ allow such measurements to be undertaken either in near real time or, if more detail analysis is required, during subsequent offline analysis.