A Survey of Military Planning Systems

Future military operations rely on increasingly complex joint and multinational environments. This calls for innovative concepts, doctrine, and technologies to support the emergence of new planning and execution systems that are more flexible, adaptive, interoperable, and responsive to a time-varying uncertain environment. The ability to conduct joint operations imposes shared information and interoperability requirements to operate among coalition members as growing complexity and rapid pace of military operations transit from a rigid vertical organizational structure to a more integrated, modular and tailored one. In that regard, Network Centric Operations (NCO) offers a unique setting to take on emerging challenges. Even though deliberate planning tools focus on providing “on the fly” precise tailoring and time phasing of force deployment in crisis situations, suitable coordinated responses are subject to a variety of real-time constraints, local views reflecting incomplete time-varying uncertain information from multiple sources, bounded computational resources and communication bandwidth. The combination of artificial intelligence, operations research and data mining techniques to mention a few, and webbased and information technologies, offer a great opportunity to address new planning system design and integration requirements. In this paper pertinent mission planning and scheduling systems designed to support relevant and specific Air Force and in a certain extent Joint and Navy Forces needs were reviewed. The survey addresses various issues associated with mission planning functions and provides a brief description of methods, tools, and procedures used to plan and schedule complex military operations. Emerging techniques used to build advanced mission planning systems are also examined.