Cooperative Planning and Control of Future Combat Systems Resupply Operations: A Component-Based Approach

Army Future Combat Systems (FCS) programs are revolutionizing sustainment concepts to include new inventory management techniques and robotics-enhanced Materials-Handling Equipment (MHE). Building on our Phase I work, we propose to automate key aspects of emerging sustainment tactics, techniques, and procedures. Our approach employs a three-level, hierarchical, component-based software architecture. This architecture exploits recent advances in constraint-based planning and hierarchical control to decouple the interdependent problems of planning, scheduling, routing, and robotic control. The top level uses constraint-based planning techniques to develop rough-cut resupply plans that respect task priorities and meet deadlines. The middle level refines these plans into a global schedule for a group of coordinated assets such as a Forward Support Battalion. The bottom level manages the movement of individual vehicles. We will evaluate the system's generality and efficiency through Army-sponsored integration experiments using real hardware, including ARDEC's Smart Crane test bed. These experiments will apply our system to multi-vehicle resupply scenarios involving combinations of manually operated, semi-autonomous, and fully autonomous MHE, harmonized with FCS's evolving sustainment CONOPS.