In this initiative, KBSI is researching the design of a real-time, effects-directed, collaborative planning capability that will help military planners in their development and management of air tasking orders (ATOs).  ATOs in the Gulf War, for example, defined operations for thousands of missions and dictated weapons packages, targets, takeoff and recovery times, ingress and egress routes, etc. for manned and unmanned aircraft missions. The development of these ATOs is extremely complex and time consuming, involving competing resource requirements, mitigating en route threats, and contingency and mission-abort options in addition to the more straight forward target and weapon selection decisions.  This level of military planning is a highly heuristic process involving a great deal of learned judgment and more than a little intuition.

The Real-time Assessment, Planning, and Integrated Decision Support (RAPIDS™) is an automated environment that will allow military planners to more rapidly and effectively maintain situation awareness of the world state conditions, constraints, and goals governing the planned use of manned and unmanned aircraft. The process of developing ATOs in the Gulf War was complicated by the difficulty in achieving integration among the different actors in the crowded theater of operations. The RAPIDS ™ concept will help military planners match the pace of planning with the pace of change in the theater of operations—continuously and in real time—in an automated, collaborative environment.

The first phase of this initiative investigated the feasibility of developing an optimized, real-time mission planning capability supporting the management of emergent air support requests, the scheduling of missions to satisfy those requests, and the dynamic management and execution of evolving operations. KBSI focused on identifying and addressing key voids and opportunities for improving emergent task planning and schedule decision-making. This resulted in an innovative RAPIDS™ solution concept demonstrator that included high-level problem formulation, a prototype weapons-target pairing optimization program, a robust set of demonstration and test scenarios, and semi-autonomous COA option generation. The demonstrator also provides a multi-criteria optimization (MCO) framework with stop-light cues and drill-down support for COA tradeoff analysis, and intelligent recommendation explanation generation capabilities. 

These results show significant progress in developing a technology base that supports the effective employment of manned and unmanned aircraft in highly dynamic conditions involving both emergent threats and opportunities.  This phase of the project advanced the science and practical capability of real-time aircraft mission planning. 

The RAPIDS™ concept will help realize new levels of integration among planners and assets in an immersive, collaborative mission planning process.  RAPIDS™ will provide new, innovative planning support capabilities including intelligent reasoning, information filtering, constraint management, constraint propagation, decision support, and intuitive human-system interaction designs.