Agile Engagement Planning

Our Phase I effort explored combining a Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) solver with a Constraint Satisfaction Reasoning (CSR) system to provide an "agile" missile defense engagement planner. We demonstrated the ability to accept a missile defense problem formulation at run-time and execute the formulation using the SDP solver to select weapon allocations. The CSR component insures the feasibility of each allocation against a user defined set of engagement constraints. This is accomplished by maintaining a network of engagement support tasks for each resource and searching for intervals where new tasks can be inserted into the network. The phase 1 effort used a flat file interface to define the problem formulation and limited constraints to temporal resource constraints. The Phase II effort will extend the Agile Engagement Planning concept into an operational prototype system for missile defense applications. The key extension to the phase 1 proof-of-concept system will be an intuitive user interface for defining the problem formulation. We will expand the flexibility of the system by allowing for a wider range of constraint types and introducing methods to specify objectives. The end product will be integrated into MDA's project Hercules Global Planner and tested via experiments and user evaluation sessions.