Open-source platform puts the military common operational picture in any browser

In modern military and crisis-management operations, the single most valuable artifact on a commander’s screen is often the Common Operational Picture, or COP: a shared, map-based representation of units, tasks, hazards, reports, terrain, and infrastructure that everyone in a headquarters can see at once. A new open-source software platform called COMPACT, described in the journal SoftwareX by Damian Frąszczak and Mariusz Chmielewski of the Military University of Technology in Poland, aims to make that artifact something researchers can actually build, inspect, modify, and reproduce — something that closed commercial command systems have long made nearly impossible.

The motivation behind COMPACT lies in a well-established body of research on situation awareness. Since Mica Endsley’s foundational work in the 1990s, scientists have understood situation awareness as a three-stage process: perceiving the relevant elements in an environment, comprehending what they mean, and projecting how they will evolve. A COP does not automatically deliver any of this. It provides an information space in which users can collect, filter, compare, and interpret operational data, and its value depends on how well the underlying system supports data fusion, deconfliction, and the inference of operational context. In multi-domain operations, where land, air, maritime, cyber, and space effects converge, the challenge of integrating heterogeneous data sources has only grown, producing a tangle of protocols such as NATO Friendly Force Information, Cursor on Target, and OTH Gold, and databases such as the Joint C3 Information Exchange Data Model.

Existing software covers important parts of this landscape, the authors argue, but none of it fills the specific niche COMPACT targets. The Team Awareness Kit ecosystem — ATAK on Android, WinTAK on Windows, iTAK on iOS, and TAK Server — excels at operational team awareness and distributed collaboration, but demands comparatively heavy deployment and administration. Humanitarian platforms such as Ushahidi and Sahana Eden support crisis mapping and resource coordination with different domain models. Geographic information system packages like ArcGIS and QGIS offer powerful spatial analysis, yet constructing a true operational picture requires tactical symbology, controlled scenario workflows, and integration mechanisms that generic GIS tools do not provide out of the box. Commercial command-and-control products such as Palantir Gotham or SitaWare are operationally mature but proprietary, blocking the source-level inspection and modification that reproducible science requires. Earlier academic prototypes, including tCOP, mCOP, and COPE, demonstrated the concept but were rarely released as reusable, browser-based, API-driven artifacts.

COMPACT positions itself precisely in that gap. It is not intended to replace mature operational C2 systems, specialized GIS platforms, or TAK-based field collaboration. Instead, it offers an open, modifiable environment in which researchers can construct, reuse, and vary COP scenarios under controlled conditions, while explicitly inspecting both the scenario model and the REST API that connects everything together. The contribution is deliberately architectural and methodological rather than algorithmic: the platform introduces no new data-fusion calculus or situation-awareness theory, but provides the substrate on which such research can be conducted repeatably.

Technically, COMPACT follows a modular client-server architecture. The backend is written in Java on the Spring Boot framework, while the frontend is a browser-based single-page application that offloads most processing to the client device, reducing server traffic. The codebase is organized into Maven submodules handling shared utilities, JPA-annotated domain models, decision-support services, business logic, and the web application. It ships as a ready-to-use artifact deployable in Docker, with an embedded H2 database for simple local installation and the option to migrate to PostgreSQL for persistent, multi-user deployments. Crucially, it can run in local, disconnected, or edge environments — a requirement for laboratories, training servers, and tactical network nodes where cloud connectivity cannot be assumed.

The platform’s unified scenario model is its central innovation. Military units, CBRN contamination reports, search-and-rescue assets, crisis-management incidents, points of interest, raster and vector layers, terrain data, and GIS objects are all represented in a single typed structure. Scenarios can be prepared through the graphical interface or generated programmatically through a Swagger-documented REST API supporting full create, read, update, and delete operations. This means instructors can prepare command-post exercises, staff-training sessions, or CBRN drills in which trainees analyze a shared picture and later revisit the identical scenario during debriefing. Researchers can generate comparable scenario variants, introduce controlled changes to information availability, and replay operational situations while external simulations or analytical models retrieve the current COP state through the API.

Beyond visualization, COMPACT embeds genuine geospatial analysis. Its decision-support services consume Digital Terrain Elevation Data files to compute flood-zone delimitations, terrain profiles along selected paths, and line-of-sight calculations for observation and reconnaissance planning, alongside distance, area, and coordinate-format tools. The platform ingests KML, GeoJSON, TopoJSON, and Mapbox Vector Tiles, and supports Web Map Service layers for weather and elevation. These are not merely cartographic conveniences: they let users evaluate how spatial conditions affect routes, exposure to hazards, accessibility, and the interpretation of reported events — the transition from a shared picture to task-oriented situation awareness.

The authors illustrate the platform with synthetic scenarios built around plausible operational workflows rather than any real incident. In a search-and-rescue scenario for a missing child, the coordinator integrates a last known position, witness reports, three SAR rings, four prioritized search sectors, and resources including a foot team, a K9 team, and a UAV thermal team, with terrain-profile and line-of-sight tools supporting route selection and drone observation planning. A second scenario tackles search under uncertainty: an unidentified aerial object whose signal degrades, forcing the operator to separate areas visible to ground teams from lower-confidence zones affected by vegetation and terrain masking, and to allocate UAV reconnaissance accordingly. A third demonstrates COMPACT as an embeddable widget in a multi-view headquarters dashboard, where separate COP views display different incidents, hazards, and resources while the REST API exchanges state with external analytical components.

Integration with external sources follows a deliberately explicit pattern. A simulator, sensor gateway, or experiment-control component publishes a position update to an external queue; a lightweight adapter validates the message, resolves the external object identifier to the corresponding COMPACT object, maps the fields to the correct data-transfer object, and submits the update through the REST API. The platform persists the change and the browser retrieves the modified state through the standard retrieval path. The scope is application-level interoperability based on JSON over HTTP — the authors are candid that semantic interoperability with operational C2 standards, native broker integration, and automated cross-source identity reconciliation remain future work, as do automated fusion mechanisms such as duplicate detection, conflict resolution, and confidence modeling.

The impact, the authors emphasize, is methodological rather than empirical. COMPACT does not claim that any particular COP design improves performance in all contexts; it provides a reusable experimental environment for studying how data availability, terrain analysis, interface configuration, and update mechanisms influence situation awareness, workload, decision accuracy, and coordination. No controlled evaluation with end users has yet been reported, and the platform should be understood as a research instrument rather than a validated decision-support system. But by releasing the code under an MIT license on a public repository, the team has lowered a barrier that has long kept common-operational-picture research confined to closed systems — and opened the shared map of modern operations to anyone with a browser and a question.

Subject of Research: An open-source software platform for constructing and studying common operational picture scenarios in multi-domain military and crisis-management research

Article Title: COMPACT: common operational multi-domain picture analysis combat & tactics

Article References: Frąszczak, D., & Chmielewski, M. (2026). COMPACT: common operational multi-domain picture analysis combat & tactics. SoftwareX, 36, Article 103106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2026.103106

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.softx.2026.103106

Keywords: common operational picture, situation awareness, open-source software, command and control, C4ISR, geographic information systems, REST API, search and rescue, terrain analysis, multi-domain operations, data fusion, crisis management