Building a Tool for Battle Planning: Challenges, Tradeoffs, and Experimental Findings

Use of knowledge-based decision aids can help alleviate the challenges of planning complex operations. We describe a knowledge-based tool capable of translating a high-level concept for a tactical military operation into a fully detailed, actionable plan, producing automatically (or with human guidance) plans with realistic degree of detail and complexity. Tight interleaving of planning, adversary estimates, scheduling, routing, attrition and consumption processes comprise the computational approach of this tool. Although originally developed for Army large-unit operations, the technology is generic and also applies to a number of other domains, particularly in critical situations requiring detailed planning within a constrained period of time. In this paper, we focus particularly on the engineering tradeoffs in the design of the tool. An experimental comparative evaluation indicated that the tool's performance compared favorably with human planners.