Title: Planning For Manned And Unmanned Entities in Net-Centric Environment: Missions and Means Framework, Multi-Agent Simulation SUGGESTED TOPICS: INFORMATION SHARING AND COLLABORATION PROCESSES AND BEHAVIORS; EXPERIMENTATION AND ANALYSIS; MODELING AND SIMULATION

Today, achieving collaborative tactical planning on the battlefield presents a significant challenge in the new DoD Net-Centric systems-of-systems (SoS) and the futuristic integrated and adaptive C4ISR systems-of-systems. The primary reason is that in a Net-Centric environment both manned and unmanned heterogeneous platforms and robotic systems must work side-byside with the warfighters, but the current tactical planning architectures are not well suited for such mixed entities. Also, the unmanned entities may not have the cognitive architecture to stop executing the battlefield plan even if the conditions on the battlefield changes. Such entities must also be networked together to execute the tasks in the battlefield plan that may involve many stakeholders with different agendas, for example in complex civil-military endeavors. The paper first provides a brief overview of the industrial age military planning followed by the new collaborative tactical planning approach for Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). Using the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) concepts with Compendium as an example of a generic IBIS for solving wicked problems such as planning, NASA Brahms multi-agent oriented modeling and simulation language as a generic language, and Missions and Means Framework Model, the paper discusses the design of a generic high-level architecture for distributed collaborative tactical planning. The paper then discusses Design Navigation Method; a design scientific method that uses minimum information content theory to evaluate the tactical test plans.