Visualizing threat and impact assessment to improve situation awareness

Situation awareness comes from combined knowledge of the environment, friendly actions and adversaries\u27 actions. Impact assessment applies that knowledge to determine the consequences of those actions on specific missions and assets. In domains such as asymmetric warfare and cyber security, impact assessment is critical to provide timely and comprehensive situation awareness. An analyst needs to be able to quickly and accurately assess a situation, see the factors affecting important assets, and come to a conclusion on what the best course of actions are to take. Many attempts have been made to visualize a situation from observed raw data for better awareness. However none have attempted to visualize the impact and threat of observed actions on assets and missions. This thesis investigates critical visual elements that will enhance situation awareness. Our approach leverages results of threat and impact assessment of ongoing situations. These include changes in effects on assets and missions by activities, and the projection of current situations into the future. This set of information is strategically placed and displayed to facilitate analysts to perform forensic and real-time analysis. While other visualization tools have focused on achieving situational awareness through representing raw data in a meaningful way, this visualization attempts to enhance situational awareness though situational assessment