LCAC Mission Planner

LCAC (Landing Craft Aircraft Cushion) vehicles offer a method to attain tactical surprise in assault operations, as well as to support a variety of missions like evacuation and interception operations.  Planning the usage of LCAC requires not only planning the routes followed by the LCAC, but also obeying mission tactical constraints, for example, making sure to coordinate LCAC plans with both air and naval surface fire support.  Many other tactical, environmental, vehicle performance, and crew schedule factors should be considered when planning LCAC missions.   Given the many factors that should be considered to generate valid LCAC routes, Navy personnel need to develop specialized expertise to make effective usage of LCAC on amphibious operations.  Currently, LCAC planning is mostly a manual task that requires the use of multiple volumes of manuals and data to calculate valid routes.  Consequently, current planning takes over four hours and years of training to do properly.  Exploring different alternative routes is very time-consuming which limits the number of alternatives that are considered.  The time that it takes to properly plan LCAC routes makes it ineffective when plans need to be quickly changed to respond to new tactical requirements (e.g., new intelligence showing the presence of red forces on previously cleared areas) or changes in the environment.   We propose to create an LCAC Mission Planner tool that automates most of the LCAC planning process. In particular, the LCAC Mission Planner will enable the (i) automatic verification of routes (ensuring that routes satisfy all tactical and vehicle performance constraints given the environmental and mission planning factors), (ii) automatic generation of LCAC routes and (iii) provide post mission analysis tools. The proposed software solution will run on a desktop application as well as in a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) device used by crews onboard the air cushion vehicle.    A combination of techniques are used to support the proposed functionality:  a language to describe spatio-temporal planning constraints is defined to represent LCAC planning factors, a discrete simulation approach is used to verify that planning constraints are satisfied and calculate route performance metrics (e.g., fuel consumption), optimization techniques based on proven Probabilistic Route Planning and Genetic Algorithms are used to automatically generate routes satisfying a user defined route performance criteria, and human factors engineering (HFE) principles are used to define the LCAC planner user interface, in particular the PDA interface attending to ergonomic and human computer interaction factors to support planning by crews onboard a moving LCAC.