Agent-Supported Planning in Distributed Command and Control Environments

Abstract

To be able to meet the future challenge of employing forces anywhere in the world in support of national security objectives, modern military forces require highly synchronized, distributed planning and re-planning capabilities that are sufficiently flexible to adapt to any level of conflict. This talk will present a research program underway at the USAF Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate known as DEEP (Distributed Episodic Exploratory Planning). DEEP is an agent-based distributed planning system that has been designed to support future military command and control (C2) operations. The talk will discuss the motivation for moving from a centralized planning model to a distributed mixed-initiative approach, along with the DEEP architecture and the key research challenges for achieving this vision. The distributed agent-supported planning capabilities, which utilize past experience to solve current problems, will be emphasized.