Agent-Based Planning Execution and Monitoring

Superior information over one's adversary allows control of the battlespace, and ultimately provides opportunities to tales advantage of me adversary's vulnerability. C4I planning is critical to shape and control the pace and phasing of battlespace engagements, and requires direct access to battlespace information in order to utilize it effectively. Effective C4I planning requires the ability to seek out relevant information sources; connect them into the plan where their information flow contributes; monitor the information flow to determine changes to the battlespace; and reacting to those changes. In Phase I, an Agent-Based Planning, Execution, and Monitoring Architecture will be designed that provides dynamic, distributed, and interleaved planning and execution across C4I systems. Our goal is not to recreate planning technology, but to extend it with plan execution and monitoring techniques. In our approach informational-need is used to plan out high level goals, and then configure feedback-control, data-flow networks from information sources to those goals. During execution, data-flows are monitored and the plan network is reconfigured as the battlespace changes or as goals are achieved/failed. Thus, the data-flow provides feedback control to react to small permutations in the battlespace, and the data-flow monitoring provides reaction and replanning-triggers to large permutations.