Dynamic Agent-based Reallocation and Tasking (DART)

ABSTRACT: In this proposal, we present the set of steps and the technology needed to develop the Dynamic Agent-Based Reallocation and Tasking (DART) system for performing tasking and coordination operations of air, space and cyber assets in response to rapidly changing environments such as hurricanes. The significant disparities in the specific capabilities of the assets in these domians coupled with continually evolving life-threatening situations and uncertainty about the actual operating environment makes it particularly challenging for human planners to perform the resource reallocation activities in a crisis. Our response to this challenge is to develop DART as a system that can take human generated high level plans, with spatially and temporally distributed tasks and efficiently allocate and reallocate the available resources as the situation unfolds. To achieve this, DART will bring to bear an intuitive input specification module, a suite of state-of-the-art resource allocation algorithms and a novel meta-reasoning module to intelligently pick the appropriate algorithm based on the current situation BENEFIT: The DART system proposes to enhance the resource reallocation and tasking capabilities of the current air force decision support systems in the following ways: (a) Allocate and reallocate air-space-cyber resources efficiently across many situations and at many scales (b) Provide an intuitive interface that maps operator language and specifications to system language (c) Return multiple distinct but interesting options and perform mixed initiative planning, i.e., enable the operator to edit details of an option and have the system optimize around the edits. (d) Establish metrics to compare the various promising reallocation solutions and pick the best one (e) Allocate resources in a way that maximizes the ability of the system to handle both data and model uncertainty about the future, gaps in information and provide maximum tolerance to failures and unplanned contingencies. Our development efforts will be geared to enhance the network operations for DoD information technology systems, with potential extension to integrated command and control systems for synchronizing the air-space-cyber operations.