Comanche Situational Knowledge: A Consolidated Network View of the Battlefield: Maximizing the Versatility of the TASS Target Threat Manager

The Comanche helicopter has a demanding mission in the United States Army Objective Force. To meet this role, Comanche designers have invented new approaches that make maximal benefit of the digital battlefield. One example of this new thinking is an integrated computing architecture that eliminates the information barriers inherent to the classic set of federated systems. This architecture enables the ability to merge all target information, regardless of source, into a common database that provides a single, consolidated network view of the battlefield - for crew displays, for intelligence reporting, and for targeting. Northrop Grumman Electronic System’s Target Acquisition System Software (TASS) Program has developed the Comanche software that fulfils this role: the Target Threat Manager (TTM). The demanding requirements for this software application required extensive systems analysis and design effort to determine the best selection of algorithms that are able to fit within the constraints allowed by a real-time, airborne helicopter environment. This paper provides an overview of the final TTM design and details of its critical Association algorithms, the key capability that enables the crew to have complete situational knowledge.