Integrating AI Components for a Military Planning Application

We integrated three mature AI reasoning systems and several legacy military systems in order to provide human planners with advanced capabilities in a military planning domain. The integration demonstrates the operation of a diverse set of AI applications that present a unified system to a human planner in a realistic and meaningful context. We began with an operational planning support system and integrated into it AI components that filled technology gaps. These components, drawn from AI research laboratories, were a generative planner, a temporal reasoner and plan visualizer, and a knowledge-based plan critiquer. The resulting system uses a shared representation to support plan authoring, consistency checking, feasibility analysis, replanning, and visibility into the plan. The support provided is flexible and user controlled. We describe lessons learned from the simultaneous application and integration of mature AI research software, and for individual system components, primarily as they relate to the representation of plans.