A Methodology to Support Anticipatory Planning

A new approach to military planning and execution has been proposed. This approach seeks to merge planning and execution, and replaces reaction to events with anticipation of events. Anticipatory Planning can benefit from automation. This paper presents a methodology for building an automated system to support Anticipatory Planning. A Plan Description is developed to manage the many branches that occur in planning and execution of an operation. This Plan Description can then be compared to the actual operation. A Planning Executive can use the differences between the plan and the actual operation to control the activities of Planners and Execution Monitors in anticipating future branches to the plan. At the heart of the system are inference mechanisms for determining branches in the plan and simulations for predicting future states. This methodology will enable the development of a prototype Anticipatory Planning Support System for evaluation of this new approach to military planning and execution.