Building a Tool for Battle Planning: Challenges,Tradeoffs, and Experimental Findings

Use of knowledge-based decision aids can help alleviate the challenges of planning complex operations. We describe a knowledge-based tool capable of translating a high-level concept for a tactical military operation into a fully detailed, actionable plan, producing automatically (or with human guidance) plans with realistic degree of detail and complexity. Tight interleaving of planning, adversary estimates, scheduling, routing, attrition and consumption processes comprise the computational approach of this tool. Although originally developed for Army large-unit operations, the technology is generic and also applies to a number of other domains, particularly in critical situations requiring detailed planning within a constrained period of time. In this paper, we focus particularly on the engineering tradeoffs in the design of the tool. An experimental comparative evaluation indicated that the tool's performance compared favorably with human planners. Alexander Kott is a Program Manager at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). While performing the research described in this paper, he was the Director of R&D at Carnegie Group, Inc., and a Technical Director at BBN Technologies in Pittsburgh, PA. His work included development of algorithms and decision aids for dealing with dynamic planning and scheduling in constrained, uncertain and adversarial environments, and research in dynamic distributed decision-making systems, such as in military command and control. He earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh where he explored the use AI techniques for innovative design of systems. He can be reached at DARPA, 3701 N Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22203. Raymond Budd is a member of the technical staff at BBN Technologies. His areas of interest include knowledge representations, knowledge engineering, and planning and scheduling. He received a BS in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. Contact him at BBN Technologies 1300 N. 17th Street, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209. Larry Ground is a senior analyst with Green River Associates, Inc. His research interests include development of tools for analysis and decision support of Army maneuver and logistics planning. Retired from the US Army as a Lieutenant Colonel, he served in a variety of command and staff positions and taught at the US Army Command and General Staff College. He is a Certified Professional Logistician by the International Society of Logistics. Contact him at Green River Associates, Inc., Fredericksburg, VA. Lakshmi Rebbapragada is a senior computer engineer at US Army CECOM Research, Development and Engineering Center (RDEC). Her research interests include application of advanced technologies to tactical planning, execution-based replanning, VA Standards for Ontology based Knowledge sharing re-use, and Network Centric Infrastructure for Command and Control. She is a member of the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) Working Group. She has a Ph.D in High Energy Physics from Bristol University U.K. She can be contacted at PM UA NSI Battle Command, Bldg. 2405, Ft. Monmouth, NJ 07703. John Langston is a senior analyst with Austin Information Systems. He served in a variety of command and staff positions in the US Army, including extensive combat experience in the Republic of Vietnam. Retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, he is widely recognized for his extensive research and knowledge in the areas of military leadership and decision making and has contributed significantly to the development of automated battle planning tools. Contact him at Austin Information Systems, Whispering Woods Cove, Parkville, MO 64152.     

Physiological responses to weight lifting in different planes

A weight of 10 kg was lifted by 11 normal male volunteers (mean age 34·2 years) from ground to knee, hip, and shoulder levels in the sagittal, lateral and oblique planes. During these lifting manoeuvres intra-abdominal pressure was measured by telemetry and the activity of erector spinae and external oblique were recorded by electromyography. The values obtained for peak and sustained intra-abdominal pressure and the averaged electromyographic activities of erectores spinae and external obliques were subjected to analysis of variance and correlation analysis. A significant difference between the responses in these three planes was found: the sagittal plane activities evoke least response. Intra-abdominal pressures, erector spinae activity and external oblique activity were highly significantly correlated in each of the three planes.     

Temporal Reasoning for a Collaborative Planning Agent in a Dynamic Environment

We present a temporal reasoning mechanism for an individual agent situated in a dynamic environment such as the web and collaborating with other agents while interleaving planning and acting. Building a collaborative agent that can flexibly achieve its goals in changing environments requires a blending of real-time computing and AI technologies. Therefore, our mechanism consists of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning subsystem and a Real-Time (RT) scheduling subsystem. The AI planning subsystem is based on a model for collaborative planning. The AI planning subsystem generates a partial order plan dynamically. During the planning it sends the RT scheduling subsystem basic actions and time constraints. The RT scheduling subsystem receives the dynamic basic actions set with associated temporal constraints and inserts these actions into the agent's schedule of activities in such a way that the resulting schedule is feasible and satisfies the temporal constraints. Our mechanism allows the agent to construct its individual schedule independently. The mechanism handles various types of temporal constraints arising from individual activities and its collaborators. In contrast to other works on scheduling in planning systems which are either not appropriate for uncertain and dynamic environments or cannot be expanded for use in multi-agent systems, our mechanism enables the individual agent to determine the time of its activities in uncertain situations and to easily integrate its activities with the activities of other agents. We have proved that under certain conditions temporal reasoning mechanism of the AI planning subsystem is sound and complete. We show the results of several experiments on the system. The results demonstrate that interleave planning and acting in our environment is crucial.     

Determining the protective function of sports footwear

To reduce the risk of injury associated with foot-ground interaction during sporting activities, there is a need for adequate assessment of the protective function of sports footwear. The present objectives are to review the typical biomechanical approaches used to identify protection offered by sports footwear during dynamic activities and to outline some of the recent methodological approaches aimed at improving this characterization. Attention is focused on biomechanical techniques that have been shown to best differentiate safety features of footwear. It was determined that subject tests would be used in combination with standard mechanical techniques to evaluate footwear protection. Impact attenuation characteristics of footwear during sporting activities were most distinguished by analysis of tibial shock signals in the frequency and joint time-frequency domains. It has been argued that lateral stability and traction properties of footwear are better assessed using game-like manoeuvres of subjects on the actual sporting surface. Furthermore, the ability of such tests to discriminate between shoes has been improved through methods aimed at reducing or accounting for variability in individual execution of dynamic manoeuvres. Advances in tools allowing measurement of dynamic foot function inside the shoe also aid our assessment of shoe protective performance. In combination, these newer approaches should provide more information for the design of safer sports footwear.     

Determining the protective function of sports footwear

To reduce the risk of injury associated with foot-ground interaction during sporting activities, there is a need for adequate assessment of the protective function of sports footwear. The present objectives are to review the typical biomechanical approaches used to identify protection offered by sports footwear during dynamic activities and to outline some of the recent methodological approaches aimed at improving this characterization. Attention is focused on biomechanical techniques that have been shown to best differentiate safety features of footwear. It was determined that subject tests would be used in combination with standard mechanical techniques to evaluate footwear protection. Impact attenuation characteristics of footwear during sporting activities were most distinguished by analysis of tibial shock signals in the frequency and joint time-frequency domains. It has been argued that lateral stability and traction properties of footwear are better assessed using game-like manoeuvres of subjects on the actual sporting surface. Furthermore, the ability of such tests to discriminate between shoes has been improved through methods aimed at reducing or accounting for variability in individual execution of dynamic manoeuvres. Advances in tools allowing measurement of dynamic foot function inside the shoe also aid our assessment of shoe protective performance. In combination, these newer approaches should provide more information for the design of safer sports footwear.     

Operational Considerations for Teaming Manned and Unmanned Helicopter

“Manned-Unmanned Teaming” among others refers to the use of an unmanned, flying sensor. One use for this is as an integral part of air units’ flying systems. Secondly, it can be used as an independent, recessed robotic component during missions, even from far away and ahead of time. As part of the German R&T project “Manned- Unmanned Teaming” (MUM-T), Elektroniksystem- und Logistik-GmbH (ESG) was assigned the task of investigating these concepts and the options for their realization. The focus of the investigation was initial operation capability within a narrow time frame concentrating on German Army Aviation helicopters. The paper focuses on the results achieved by ESG and begins with a short project overview. In the main part a representative MUM-T mission based on a personnel recovery mission is presented. The mission was demonstrated by ESG in close cooperation with German Army Aviation Combat Development Division (Ger AAV CDD). Beside operational aspects, technical aspects will be discussed. The lecture will close with a short outlook on the next steps, bringing MUM-T missions into service.     

The expressiveness of locally stratified programs

This paper completes an investigation of the logical expressibility of finite, locally stratified, general logic programs. We show that every hyperarithmetic set can be defined by a suitably chosen locally stratified logic program (as a set of values of a predicate over its perfect model). This is an optimal result, since the perfect model of a locally stratified program is itself an implicitly definable hyperarithmetic set (under a recursive coding of the Herbrand base); hence, to obtain all hyperarithmetic sets requires something new, in this case selecting one predicate from the model. We find that the expressive power of programs does not increase when one considers the programs which have a unique stable model or a total well-founded model. This shows that all these classes of structures (perfect models of logically stratified logic programs, well-founded models which turn out to be total, and stable models of programs possessing a unique stable model) are all closely connected with Kleene's hyperarithmetical hierarchy. Thus, for general logic programming, negation with respect to two-valued logic is related to the hyperarithmetic hierarchy in the same way as Horn logic is to the class of recursively enumerable sets. In particular, a set is definable in the well-founded semantics by a programP whose well-founded partial model is total iff it is hyperarithmetic.Research partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through the Mathematical Sciences Institute of Cornell University.Research partially supported by NSF Grant IRI-9012902 and partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through the Mathematical Sciences Institute of Cornell University.Research partially supported by NSF Grant IRI-8905166 and partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through the Mathematical Sciences Institute of Cornell University.     

Parallel and diagonal parking in nonholonomic autonomous vehicles

This paper considers the problem of parallel and diagonal parking in wheeled vehicles. A method to plan in real-time a set of collision-free manoeuvres is presented. Artificial intelligent techniques, namely fuzzy logic, play an important role in the practical application of the method. Thus, a fuzzy system is used to select the most suitable manoeuvre from the solution set according with the environment, dealing with optimality, path tracking performance and collision avoidance trade-off. This technique has been implemented in a fuzzy behaviour-based control architecture combining planning and reactivity. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated using the nonholonomic mobile robot ROMEO-3R designed and built at the University of Seville.     

An integrated production-inventory deteriorating model for pricing policy considering imperfect production,inspection planning and warranty-period- and stock-level-dependant demand

In marketing, enterprises try all motivated selling strategies to stimulate customers to buy a product. One of these selling strategies is a warranty policy that provides a return promise of free replacement. The buyer may place more orders because of the display of the product. An increasing demand resulting from these motivated factors influences the replenishment planning. In operational process, quality level resulting in relevant activities may cause changes of operational planning. The purpose of this study is to investigate an integrated production inventory deteriorating model considering the pricing policy, the imperfect production, the inspection planning, the warranty-period and the stock-level-dependant demand with the Weibull deterioration, partial backorder and inflation. We incorporate a single-retailer single-manufacturer cooperation from the perspectives of both the manufacturer and the retailer. The classical optimisation technique and the heuristic method are used to derive the optimum solutions. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis are presented.     

Trajectory Planning and Control for Airport Snow Sweeping by Autonomous Formations of Ploughs

This article presents a control approach that enables an autonomous operation of fleets of unmanned snow ploughs at large airports. The proposed method is suited for the special demands of tasks of the airport snow shovelling. The robots have to keep a compact formation of variable shapes during moving into the locations of their deployment and for the autonomous sweeping of runways surfaces. These tasks are solved in two independent modes of the airport snow shoveling. The moving and the sweeping modes provide a full-scale solution of the trajectory planning and coordination of vehicles applicable in the specific airport environment. Nevertheless, they are suited for any multi-robot application that requires complex manoeuvres of compact formations in dynamic environment. The approach encapsulates the dynamic trajectory planning and the control of the entire formation into one merged optimization process via a novel Model Predictive Control (MPC) based methodology. The obtained solution of the optimization includes a complete plan for the formation. It respects the overall structure of the workspace and actual control inputs for each vehicle to ensure collision avoidance and coordination of team members. The presented method enables to autonomously design arbitrary manoeuvres, like reverse driving or turning of compact formations of car-like robots, which frequently occur in the airport sweeping application. Examples of such scenarios verifying the performance of the approach are shown in simulations and hardware experiments in this article. Furthermore, the requirements that guarantee a convergence of the group to a desired state are formulated for the formation acting in the sweeping and moving modes.     

Linking business and requirements engineering: is solution planning a missing activity in software product companies?

A strong link between strategy and product development is important, since companies need to select requirements for forthcoming releases. However, in practice, connecting requirements engineering (RE) and business planning is far from trivial. This paper describes the lessons learned from four software product companies that have recognized the need for more business-oriented long-term planning. The study was conducted using the action research approach. We identified five practices that seem to strengthen the link between business decisions and RE. These are (1) explicating the planning levels and time horizons; (2) separating the planning of products’ business goals from R&D resource allocation; (3) planning open-endedly with a pre-defined rhythm; (4) emphasizing whole-product thinking; and (5) making solution planning visible. To support whole-product thinking and solution planning, we suggest that companies create solution concepts. The purpose of the solution concept is to provide a big picture of the solution and guide RE activities.     

On the Hybrid Propositional Encodings of Planning

Recently, casting planning as propositional satisfiability (SAT) has been shown to be an efficient technique of plan synthesis. This article is a response to the recently proposed challenge of developing novel propositional encodings that are based on a combination of different types of plan refinements and characterizing the tradeoffs. We refer to these encodings as hybrid encodings. An investigation of these encodings is important, because this can give insights into what kinds of planning problems can be solved faster with hybrid encodings.
Encodings based on partial–order planning and state–space planning have been reported in previous research. We propose a new type of encoding called a unifying encoding that subsumes these two encodings. We also report on several other hybrid encodings. Next, we show how the satisfiability framework can be extended to incremental planning. State–space encoding is attractive because of its lower size and causal encoding is attractive because of its highest flexibility in reordering steps. We show that hybrid encodings have a higher size and a lower flexibility in step reordering and, thus, do not combine the best of these encodings. We discuss in detail several specific planning scenarios where hybrid encodings are likely to be superior to nonhybrid encodings.     

Coming of old age: understanding older adults’ engagement and needs in coproduction activities for healthy ageing

We report an investigation of how older adults engage in social activities and community events in support of their mental, physical, and emotional health. We focus on personal and collaborative agency in a community context, and construe health as an outcome that is coproduced by a person and other engaged community members. Using qualitative methods, we investigated the coproduction of health among members of retirement communities and people who are ageing in place. We found that our participants, irrespective of living arrangements, engaged in a diverse range of coproduction activities, including physical, socialising, service, discussion, and interest-based activities. We also identified desired but less-supported coproduction opportunities, such as opportunistic activities and the need to better appropriate social resources to enable coproductions. We draw from these findings to consider design implications of technological support for facilitating older adults to coproduce.     

Data and knowledge modeling for design–process planning integration of sheet metal components

Realizing design–process planning integration is vital to the competitiveness of manufacturing organization and its ability to respond rapidly to market changes. Many attempts have been made in the past proposing the integration of the two activities based on product data models. However, both design and process planning activities are knowledge intensive. An effective integration is possible only if both data and knowledge models form a basis for integration. This paper presents key issues related to data and knowledge modeling for integration of design (CAD) and process planning (CAPP) activities for sheet metal components. Previous attempts to model data and knowledge have concentrated only on either design or process planning and not from an integration point of view. Moreover, in these attempts data and knowledge models have been proposed without attempting to relate the two. The same has been overcome in the present work. An integration framework based on data and knowledge is proposed at the end and discussed for domain of design–process planning integration of sheet metal components.     

The effects of collaboration on build-to-order supply chains: with a comparison of BTO,MTO, and MTS

The initiative of collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment has generally provided rich options of strategies for build-to-order (BTO) supply chain members. In this study, we examined collaborative activities across BTO, make-to-order (MTO), and make-to-stock (MTS) supply chains. We draw upon the results from an empirical research from 126 manufacturing companies to illustrate what collaborative activities will enable companies to achieve better market performance, given their particular production circumstances. We have provided three major findings in this study: (1) identified a set of activities that are viewed as important for collaboration by business managers; (2) recognized various effects of collaboration on BTO, MTO, and MTS; and (3) illustrated the association between collaborative activities in BTO, MTO, and MTS supply chain and firm’s market performance.     

An execution model for exploiting AND-parallelism in logic programs

This paper presents a parallel execution model for exploiting AND-parallelism in Horn Clause logic programs. The model is based upon the generator-consumer approach, and can be implemented efficiently with small run-time overhead. Other related models that have been proposed to minimize the run-time overhead are unable to exploit the full parallelism inherent in the generator-consumer approach. Furthermore, our model performs backtracking more intelligently than these models. We also present two implementation schemes to realize our model: one has a coordinator to control the activities of processes solving different literals in the same clause; and the other achieves synchronization by letting processes pass messages to each other in a distributed fashion. Trade-offs between these two schemes are then discussed. This work was supported by Army Research Office grant #DAAG29-84-K-0060 to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.     

An Investigation into the Effects of Stress upon Skilled Performance

An account is presented of an investigation of the effect of an anxiety-producing situation, namely the imminence of a parachute jump, upon skill in an acquisition tracking task. Parachutists at three levels of practice wore oxamined: 19 experienced Regular Army men, 9 Regular Army trainees, and 10 Territorial Army (TA) trainees. It was found that tho TA men were more affected (p <0.05) than the Regular trainees, who were more affected (p<0.001) than the experienced Regulars, who were not affected at all.

It is concludod that anxiety does produce a decrement in tasks of this kind, although such decrements can be minimized by appropriate training. It is suggested that an investigation into the best form of such training might bo well worth whilo.     

Convergence and divergence in information systems and knowledge based systems development methodologies: a case for integrated strategic planning

There is a need to integrate knowledge based systems (KBS) with information systems (IS) technical solutions, which implies that KBS and IS development methodologies should be less isolated from each other. KBS and IS development methodologies are generally examined in terms of their similarities and differences. There is divergence at the feasibility and analysis stages, convergence at the design and coding stages, divergence during testing, convergence at the implementation stage, and divergence during maintenance. There are more similarities than there are differences between IS and KBS methodologies, particularly during the strategic planning stage. It is argued that linking KBS strategic planning to the planning element of an IS methodology will go further towards ensuring that the whole of the business is considered, leading to better integrated IS/KBS solutions. Application selection activities of two well-known KBS methodologies are briefly analysed. We show that these activities, which precede the feasibility study, do not consider the strategic aspects of the use of KBS (and IS in general) in business organizations. It is argued that a KBS strategy should be formulated in relation to the IS strategy and the business strategy, therefore increasing the convergence between IS and KBS methodologies.     

Lumbar spine forces during manoeuvring of ceiling-based and floor-based patient transfer devices

Patient handling continues to represent a high risk task for low back pain (LBP) among health caregivers. Previous studies indicated that manual transfers of patients impose unacceptable loads on the spine even when two caregivers perform the transfer. Patient lift devices are considered a potential intervention; however, few biomechanical analyses have investigated the spine loads and LBP risk associated with these transfer devices. This study analysed the 3-D spine forces imposed upon the lumbar spine when 10 subjects manipulated ceiling-based and floor-based patient lifts through various patient handling conditions and manoeuvres. The results indicated that ceiling-mounted patient lift systems imposed spine forces upon the lumbar spine that would be considered safe, whereas floor-based patient handling systems had the potential to increase anterior/posterior shear forces to unacceptable levels during patient handling manoeuvres. Given these findings, ceiling-based lifts are preferable to floor-based patient transfer systems.