Making Plans Alive

Systems for Coalition Operations, September 2010 Over the years, researchers have expended considerable effort in attempts to improve military planning, most notably via the provision of automated planning support tools. While there have been some successes (e.g. the DART system which was used for movement planning during Gulf war), planning still remains a very human‐orientated activity with little technical support. Why? A possible reason for this predicament is that researchers have not fully conceptualized the problem that planners face. For instance, a common approach has been to consider planning as a single process or a homogenous set of problems to be solved. Unfortunately, military planning is instead a set of heterogeneous and interrelated activities carried out by different sets of planners working at different times and locations. In addition, these sets of activities may be conceptually quite different from each other. It is therefore proposed that military planning should be viewed more appropriately as a capability, which consists of a set of diverse activities which are collectively aimed at producing a set of coordinated plans to achieve given high‐level mission objectives. This perspective, while essentially human‐ centered, suggests where it is possible to provide beneficial automated support. This paper thus proposes a conceptual framework for providing automated support for aspects of the planning capability. It will describe the complex nature of military planning and proposes a pragmatic approach to providing planning support tools. This work is one part of the International Technology Alliance (ITA) research on collaborative shared understanding and problem solving over a network, where military planning is an example of distributed collaborative p blem solving ro [1].