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Our task is to develop a planning and decision aid (PDA) for the DARPA Small Unit Operations (SUO) program, to show the
feasibility of using advanced planning technologies in SUO. The SUO concept envisions small units of warfighters, separated
and dispersed throughout a large battlespace, equipped with personal equipment providing robust geolocation, computing,
and communications capabilities to allow units to effectively operate. The PDA supports the generation of
machine-understandable plans, and the monitoring of their execution, using events as they are realistically reported in the
battlespace.
Our representations
modeled an SUO scenario with enough fidelity to provide value (as judged by our SMEs). Our PDA used a
machine-understandable plan to generate appropriate alerts for the time and location constraints in the plan, as well as for
some more global constraints such as fratricide risk. Alerts were generated in a timely manner without overwhelming the user
with too many alerts. Our execution monitoring technology was able to easily monitor the volume of realistic data on the SUO network, while not being specific to the plans used in our scenarios.
We demonstrated multiple PDAs operating over multiple echelons, namely, battalion, company and platoon. | |
