Supporting Courses of Action Planning with Intelligent Management of Battle Assets

A battle space contains information that is dynamic, unstructured, uncertain, and temporal. The commander must use this information to plan, analyze, and decide on the “best” strategy to defeat the enemy. Such information must be context-specific and content-sensitive to changes in the battle space. Typically, the commander must integrate information from various sources (terrain, weather, resources, equipment, personnel, and mission definition) to develop courses of action and executable operation order. A typical collection asset decision aid will be useful to the commander in planning for resource management, courses of action (COA) analysis, logistics, and sample profiles on the order of battle operation. This paper describes an analytical decision aid for supporting the commander’s courses of action planning and analysis based on battle asset information. The METT-T (Mission, Enemy, Troops, Terrain, and Time) paradigm is the main knowledge that drives the Alternative Courses of Action Display (ACAD) software. Usability test of the ACAD shows its utility to expert and novice battle planners have favorable impression and acceptable trust metric scores