Artificial Intelligence and Visual Techniques for Course of Action (COA) Development and Analysis

The objective of this project is to establish the technical foundation for, and the feasibility of, a tactical decision aid that can be used by a commander and staff to develop and analyze courses of action (COA). This project will combine object-oriented and distributed computing technologies into an integrated system architecture and design. Successful techniques from artificial intelligence research and visually effective presentation technologies will also be included in the Phase I design. A reusable object representation and architecture will be developed which can integrate scenarios from existing systems (e.g., METT-T, ASAS, MCS, CBS, WARSIM, JSIM). An easy-to-use and and modifiable interface will allow the incorporation of existing tools, or provide the building blocks to develop new tolls for developing and analyzing COAs. The Phase I effort will produce documentation that describes the architecture and design to be implemented during the Phase II effort. Additionally, a dynamic storyboard will be produced that will demonstrate the concept of operations of the documented system. This design will not only be useful to battalion through corps battle staffs, but can also be used in other applications such as WARSIM and JSIM for generating the plans of simulated units.