Smart Mission Planning Wizard: A Rethink Toward Automation

Mission planning is a labor and time intensive process. The complexity of the tasks and the amount of work involved require considerable training and proficiency. Such challenges represent a hurdle to mission planners especially when only minor last minute changes need to be made to a mission plan. Usually an extensive amount of work needs to be redone to account for the minor changes. The complexity and difficulty of mission planning can be attributed largely to the following factors: 1) Heavily manual and repetitive tasks, 2) lack of software intelligence that is able to capture the essence of a mission plan and connect the dots together, 3) complex user interfaces, and 4) lack of visualization tools that help mission planners better understand the different stages of a mission plan. Architecture Technology Corporation proposes an innovative solution: a simplified mission planning wizard called SMART (Smart Mission planning wizard: A Rethink Toward automation). SMART is a mission-development and management system that facilitates mission planning through automation, real time feedback, and visualization. SMART assists its users in building and validating mission plans quickly and efficiently.