Evaluating Air Campaign Plan Quality in Operational Settings

Advanced Planning Technology: Technological Achievements of the ARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative

Volume

Book One

Contents

Artificial Intelligence methods can rapidly generate plans for complex situations. However, these plans may be rejected by air campaign planning experts, who judge dimensions such as robustness using operational rather than computational criteria. Our goal is to capture the tactical and strategic concerns of air campaign planners, and incorporate these into planning technology to filter out the unacceptable options and highlight preferred plans. We are in the process of employing a complete Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA), which uses a variety of knowledge elicitation techniques to fully identify the process of plan evaluation and factors underlying judgments of plan robustness. The CTA will form the foundation of an ACP Plan Critic. The Plan Critic will evaluate plans for plan quality and will highlight potential problem areas and vulnerable assumptions. This paper summarizes the current status of this work.