A Conceptual Framework to Support a Multi-level Planning Capability

Over the years, military planning has attracted a lot of attention by researchers with the aim of providing automated planning support tools. There have been some successes (e.g., DART system which was used for movement during Gulf war) however, to-date, planning still remains a very human activity with little or no automated support tools. Why? A possible reason for this predicament is that researchers have not fully conceptualized the problem. 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 not a single activity but a set of heterogeneous but interrelated activities that are carried out by different set of planners working at different times and locations. These activities may be conceptually quite different It is therefore proposed that military planning should be viewed as a capability, which consists of diverse activities aimed at producing a set of coordinated plans to achieve given high-level mission objectives. This perspective informs a human-centered approach where it is possible to identify the key areas where automated support is most beneficial. This paper 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 addresses the ITA research on collaborative shared understanding and problem solving over a network. Military Planning is an example of distributed collaborative problem solving that is dependent on shared understanding.