Decision Theoretic Mission Planning for Air Operations

We propose to demonstrate the feasibility of a decision-theoretic planning system for air operations consisting of: 1) an Asset and Payload Scheduling component to schedule assets and payload by taking into account missions at hand and assessed situation and threat using constraint programming technology; 2) a Proactive Flight Planning component to perform route planning for a mission based on multiple way points and the current situation and threat utilizing our in-house route planning algorithm successfully applied in previous projects involving course of action forecasting (Army Geospatial Center) and safe route planning (Office of Naval Research); and 3) a Dynamic Plan Adaptation component to dynamically adjust routes during a mission based on real-time situation and threat assessment using Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) that implements a reward scheme where the most reward is obtained upon a successful strike. POMDP is suitable for handling stochastic transitions and observations in line with the uncertainty of moving a weapon delivery platform from one point to the other under variable threat. We plan to build a limited scope prototype for decision-theoretic planning for ATO objectives.