Coherence and Relevance Monitoring and Adjustment for Plans (CARMA)

ABSTRACT: Maintaining systems of military plans is difficult, yet critical. A plan may become nonexecutable because the world has diverged from the plan"s assumptions, rendering it irrelevant. If there are constant ad hoc changes to many related plans, they may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming incoherent. The Adaptive Planning process partly addresses this problem through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. However, what is needed is a highly-automated and effective system that continuously maintains living plans in response to rapidly changing conditions. Charles River Analytics proposes to design and evaluate a system for plan Coherence and Relevance Monitoring and Adjustment (CARMA) to provide an affordable, open, and extensible solution to generate and maintain living plans. First, we will design a sophisticated catalog that represents plan elements (e.g., goals, assets, terrain) and their relationships (e.g., supported, supporting, and collateral) dynamically across time and space. Second, we will design monitoring and adjustment algorithms and supporting interactive applications that can adapt plans to changes that threaten plan coherence or relevance. Third, we will design an information extraction and routing service that grounds the living plan process in more accurate, complete, and timely information. BENEFIT: The research performed under this effort will have immediate benefit to the Air Operations Center Weapon System (AOC WS) and across multiple regional and functional AOCs. Specifically, it will increase the productivity of current planners since existing plans will not have to be repeatedly reviewed and maintained. This will increase plan quality as more time can be spent thinking creatively and collaboratively. It will also improve force effectiveness as it will be going into battle with a system of plans that achieves effective unity of effort. Such advances will apply across air, maritime, ground, and space domains. This research will also enhance our commercial AgentWorks software development kit for deploying hybrid computational reasoning into an enterprise.