Electrical and Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Hao Xu has received a $350,000 grant from the Air Force Research Lab to develop a technology to help support decision-making in military operations.

The project, TITAN: a Novel Trust and Efficient AI-based Hierarchical Heterogeneous Planning and Scheduling at Tactical Edge, is expected to be completed in 2025.

Military situations have become increasingly complex, and now can include activities in cyberspace as well as traditional domains such as air, land and sea. With those changes, Xu wrote in his grant application, “the complexity of the battlefield decision process (planning and scheduling) is significantly increased.”

Decision-makers are faced with an overwhelming amount of data, Xu adds, that is both high dimensional (data in which the number of features are closer to or larger than the number of observations) and heterogeneous (data with both categorical and continuous values).

It’s a lot to process.

Xu’s work will produce a prototype system that will use advanced math and computer algorithms to process the ever-increasing data available to provide high-quality information to decision-makers.

“Our developed technique can help support decision-making in military operation by reducing the battlefield responding time as well as optimizing the multi-type military logistics in on the battlefield,” Xu said. 

Xu, who joined the University in 2016, lists his research interests as trustworthy AI, advanced signal processing, machine learning, cyber-physical systems, networked control systems, intelligent control, unmanned aircraft systems and wireless passive sensor networks.