Distributed Planning in a Mixed-Initiative Environment: Collaborative Technologies for Network Centric Operations

Abstract : The USAF Command and Control (C2) is undergoing a transformation to enable a full-spectrum, joint warfighting capability. To be able to meet the future challenge of employing forces anywhere in the world in support of national security objectives, the USAF requires a highly synchronized, distributed planning and re-planning capability that is flexible to adapt to any level of conflict. This paper describes an in-house program underway at the USAF Research Laboratory Information Directorate that is developing technologies to support the concepts of Network-Centric Operations (NCO). The research focus of this program is on the concepts and architecture needed to support the distributed, mixed-initiative, planning required for NCO. Our system builds upon distributed blackboards and multi-agent systems to provide automated opportunistic planning capabilities for distributed C2 operations. An extensible UML model of plans has also been developed to support human-machine dialog for mix-initiative planning. The plan representation is object oriented recursive, and support plan fragment operations, a key concept for distributed planning.