Agile Engagement Planning: Integrating Decision Graphs with Stochastic Dynamic Programming Solvers

"Missile Defense Engagement Planning systems are highly automated. It is the system developers, not the commanders of those systems, who are formulating the engagement planning problem and thereby deciding how engagements will be planned and executed. Inthe history of warfare system developers have never trumped commanders in deciding how a system will carry out orders, and this reversal of affairs for Missile Defense gives rise to two problems that are apparent today. First, commanders invariablydiscover that they do not actually command the system, and they demand work-around options in response. This is euphemistically called `management by exception', but it is simply a patchwork of ad-hoc controls to get the system to do what users want.Second, Engagement Planning systems are hard-coded to the specific defense architectures that their developers had in mind, and they require extensive overhauls when those architectures change.The breakthrough we require is an Engagement Planning system where commanders can formulate Engagement Planning problems at will and align them with their concept of operations. We call this Agile Engagement Planning. Our innovation blends the agileproblem formulation capabilities of Decision Graphs with the computational efficiency of Stochastic Dynamic Programming solvers. Our innovation has the potential to dramatically improve human-in-control direction of Missile Defense engagements. On the one hand, sy