Evaluation of a Shared Representation to Support Collaborative, Distributed, Coalition, Multilevel Planning

 Abstract - This paper presents the extension and evaluation of a formal representation that enables planners at different levels of command, and in different functional area, to jointly share, develop, and modify plans. Planning has moved from a co-located, concurrent, small team activity to an activity that involves a large, culturally diverse, hierarchical, globally-distributed team. However, significant benefits of distributed planning can only come if the team is able to communicate and maintain a shared understanding of the commander's intent, objectives, resources and constraints, as well as decisions made and justifications for planning options chosen or alternatives rejected. Effective automated support must support the collaborative planning process itself, rather than just the artifacts the process produces. The Collaborative Planning Model (CPM) is a representational ontology developed to support military planning by distinctly representing goals, plans, constraints, and human rationale associated with decisions made while creating the plan. Over the course three years, multiple evaluations of the CPM have been conducted, culminating in a unifying evaluation of the CPM in a distributed, cross-UK- US hierarchical planning exercise. This evaluation has highlighted potential challenges that must be met when achieving shared understanding in more complex multi-level collaborative planning, including issues of representational semantics, rationale, configuration management, visualization utilizing context and filtering, plan interoperability, and interfaces.