Agent Support for Policy-Driven Mission Planning Under Constraints

Forming ad-hoc coalitions between military forces and humanitarian organisations is crucial in mission-critical scenarios. Very often coalition parties need to operate according to planning constraints and regulations, or policies. As a consequence, they find themselves not only in need to consider their own goals, but also to support coalition partners to the extent allowed by such regulations. In time-stressed conditions, this is a challenging and cognition-intensive task. In this paper, we present intelligent agents that support human planners and ease their cognitive burden by detecting and giving advice about the violation of policies and constraints. Through a series of experiments conducted with human subjects, we compare and contrast the agents’ performance on a number of metrics in three conditions: agent support with possible override, policy enforcement with no override allowed, and neither support nor enforcement.