A Hierarchical Battle Management and Planning Aid Framework for Effective

We present a hierarchical battle management and planning aids framework for effective situational awareness in stressful, time critical, and collaborative environments. The proposal herein gathers novel ideas, prior arts, and our own expertise and practices to provide an effective and practical approach for the aforementioned topic. The proposed framework is featured as unified task representation, reduced ad-hoc decision making upon dynamics and uncertainties, intelligent, scalable, easy and practical for deployment, and significantly reduced cognitive load for human operators, etc. We will (1) employ a service oriented architecture for the management (creation, categorization, editing and fast retrieval) of U.S. interception capabilities (interceptors and other weapon systems) and potential threats, (2) use a highly expressive knowledge representation method, extended hierarchical task networks (EHTNs), to specify suitable assignments between threats and corresponding U.S. capabilities through specifications of hierarchical task structures, (3) design an integrated hierarchical battle management and planning aids framework for effective situational awareness in stressful, time critical, and collaborative environments, and finally (4) explore and extend the framework to provide rationale and explanation to facilitate better understanding, re-plan (redistribute interceptors) and decision making of suitable interception allocation to threats for operators.