Intelligent Software Agents for Military Operations Planning

Planning military operations is arguably the most complex and critical activity undertaken by any modern organisation. Equipment and supplies are expensive, errors can be deadly and affect the sovereignty of nations, operational tempo is high and small details can sometimes make all the difference. This paper describes an R&D program being undertaken by Command and Control Division (C2D) of DSTO exploring concepts and capabilities for intelligent agent support to operations planning. COA-Sim is part of an integrated modelling environment being developed by DSTO for course of action development, refinement and analysis. Within this environment planners can construct, modify and analyse an entire operational-level course of action. Intelligent software agents support the planner using classical planning techniques which can find a set of alternative plans to achieve a given military end state, and analyse given plans to determine decision points. Agents can then assist the planner to simulate critical sections of a course of action as part of wargaming to strengthen and refine the final plan. Intelligent agents facilitate simulation by translating operational-level tasks into simulation-level behaviours and providing operational-level reports of simulation outcomes. Flexibility, transparency and a consistent level of representation will contribute to making the developed tools useful in practice, in a workplace that is dominated by a high tempo, high accountability and extreme professionalism.