Avoiding Information Overload Through the Understanding of OODA Loops, A Cognitive Hierarchy and Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
Raymond J. Curts · 2001
At last year’s Command & Control Research & Technology Symposium (CCRTS) at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, Dr. Richard E. Hayes from EBR and Dr. David T. Signori Jr. from RAND reported on their activities in the Information Superiority Metrics Working Group. Their presentation mentioned the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). In the late 1970s, Colonel John Boyd, USAF, wanted to understand why U.S. fighter pilots consistently won air combat engagements with their F-86 fighter aircraft in combat over Korea against pilots that flew Mig-15 aircraft with better maneuverability. His work came to be known as the OODA Loop or Boyd Cycle 1 . For these authors, the thought that a study on how fighter pilot decision-making in air-to-air combat during the Korean War had crept into a presentation on information superiority at the turn of the century was intriguing and suggested a closer look. What we discovered were logical stepping stones that led us from “fighter pilot decision-making” to previous discussions on “information overload” and from that to another CCRT presentation on the “cognitive hierarchy.” The final stepping stone for this paper was the authors’ abilities to mature this stepping stone process into a discussion of the methodology, applications and uses of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOA&D) techniques to solve the problem of information overload. The authors have long been advocates of common shared data for the description and assessment of architectures, interoperability and information assurance. This paper continues that advocacy.