A Survey of Geospatial-Temporal Visualizations for Military Operations

Abstract

European defense funding has surpassed 200 billion euros per year for the first time, with a renewed strategic interest in creating technological innovations that aid military cooperation, such as comprehensive decision-support systems. Overcoming the many challenges associated with the research and development of such military technologies presents an excellent opportunity for the visualization community’s contributions in the domain, as there is ample scope for applied research. No other recent surveys examine the use and design of Information Visualization (IV) and Visual Analytics (VA) tools in the military domain. As such, this survey’s primary interest is to investigate and assess IV and VA tools’ functionality and integration into military decision-support systems, specifically focusing on geospatial-temporal visualization aspects. Considering this objective, this survey systematically identifies and discusses suitable visualization solutions and the benefit they may offer to military decision-support systems through the lens of the Military Operations Process. This results in a domain-specific design space for analyzing various existing and relevant military products. This survey’s outcome and main contribution is thus the formulation of a design space and analysis of existing military products. This leads to identifying gaps, opportunities, and guidelines for where geospatial-temporal visualizations in military decision-support systems can enhance military commanders’ decision-making capabilities and ability to act.