Exploiting Automatic Validation in Human Mission Planning

In this paper we describe an approach to support human operators in UAV mission planning, derived from our participation to the Industrial Research Project SMAT-F1, which focused on UAV missions for monitoring the territory for civil purposes. First of all, we propose a rich modeling language for expressing the complex structure of mission plans, as well as the quantitative and qualitative constraints needed to validate human-crafted plans. Then, we describe an automatic validation module which provides the operator with feedback on the flaws in the plan she is specifying and, when possible, also with explanations of such flaws and suggestions for fixing them. An initial evaluation of the approach is performed on several scenarios that could occur during the validation of mission plans.