Using a Structured Plan Representation to Support Multi­level Planning

Military planning is primarily a human activity where plans are generated and interpreted by humans. Currently plans are represented in static format such as text, diagrams and spreadsheets which do not normally contain any of the reasoning, logic and interdependencies.  As a result, the plans are not easy to update and tend to take a lot more time than is normally available.  There is an ongoing research within the International Technology Alliance program to develop a digitized representation of plans, called Collaborative Planning Model (CPM). This paper details the results of an evaluation of the CPM, during a distributed, multi‐level military planning exercise.  The evaluation explored the representational power of CPM to support multiple planners collaborating to create a plan, and detect resource conflicts as they arose.  In addition the evaluation was able to demonstrate integration possibilities of CPM by allowing multiple planners to import, export, and merge plan on different (and independently developed) planning tools.