Software Toolkit for Optimizing Mission Plans (STOMP) for the Joint Synthetic Battlespace

The engineering analysis and acquisition of command and control (C2) technologies and systems is an extremely time-consuming and expensive endeavor. DoD is addressing these problems by embarking on the use of modeling and simulation techniques, i.e.Simulation Based Acquisition (SBA). The acquisition component of the Air Force's Joint Synthetic Battlespace (JSB) program is seen as a key enabler of SBA via providing a persistent synthetic battlespace infrastructure to support the exploration, design,development, analysis, and testing of new warfighting systems and concepts. To address SBA and the realization of JSB, systems and tools are required to rapidly generate synthetic representations and populate the synthetic components necessary to supportassessment and acquisition of C2 systems for Air Operations Centers (AOCs). One of the tasks within an AOC is the development of air campaign mission plans. Here, we propose a Software Toolkit for Optimizing Mission Plans (STOMP) for the Joint SyntheticBattlespace. STOMP integrates an off-line genetic algorithm-based mechanism to rapidly generate, analyze, and visualize mission plans in tandem with a software interoperability bridge to provide the requisite translation and interface with JSB syntheticcomponent databases. Commercial applications of the proposed approach to mission planning exist for a wide variety of domains where a need exists for optimized scheduling, such as transportation systems, supply chain management, and law enforcementresource allocation. In addition, the proposed effort will impact the development and enhancement of our Intelligent Agent Toolkit, via the incorporation of the genetic algorithms-based planning and adaptation and the visualization components of theproposed system developed under this SBIR effort.