Using Spoken Language to Facilitate Military Transportation Planning

The DARPA SLS Program is developing a technology that has been justified, at least in part, by its potential relevance to military applications. In an effort to demonstrate the relevance of SIS technology to real-world military applications, BBN has undertaken the task of providing a spoken language interface to DART, a system for military logistical transportation planning. We discuss the transportation planning process, describe the real-world DART system, identify parts of the system where spoken language can facilitate planning, and describe BBN's work towards porting the HARC SIS system to the DART domain. T R A N S P O R T A T I O N P L A N N I N G Logistical transportation planning is the process of determining how to get people and cargo from where they are to where they need to be. Inter-theatre movements of personnel and supplies around the world are currently planned for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and other services by USTRANSCOM (the US TRANSportation COMmand) which operates under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The transportation plarming process is quite complex, involving very large databases of movement requirements, and information about personnel, cargo, transportation assets, and geographic locations. Currently, the human interface to military planning systems is relatively enmbersome and unintelligent, which adds extra complexity to the planner's task. As a domain for the application of spoken language, military transportation planning has a number of advantages: 1. Transportation planning is an essential military function and successful application of spoken language would be both useful to TRANSCOM and visible to other potential military users of SLS technology. 2. The concept of planning movements of people and supplies can be understood by a wide audience. 3. The application is non-trivial and, in the DART context that we will describe, affords opportunities for applying spoken language understanding at many levels of sophistication. 4. Current efforts to improve the planning process using nonspeech technology have been weU-received, and cooperative users may be available as close as Scott Air Force Base near St. Louis. 5. An unclassified development database is available in Oracle on a Son. T H E D A R T S Y S T E M BBN is currently involved in an effort to improve the transportation process using non-speech teclmology. The DART (Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool) project 1 , is demonstrating the operational impact of AI planning and scheduling technology on t ransportat ion planning at USTRANSCOM. DART addresses an urgent need for fast and accurate plan generation and evaluation to support both longrange, hypothetical planning and planning in such crisis-response operations as those in the Middle East. The current DART system [1] is in use at Scott Air Force Base and other locations around the globe. The workstation environment which has been installed at TRANSCOM to support DART is already being used and has been credited with reducing routine plan analysis from 3 days to I day [2]. The architecture of the DART system is shown in figure 1. The heart of the system is a relational database. The database is initialized with data from two sources, a database of transportation characteristics, and a Time Phased Force Deployment Database (rPFDD). TPFDDs are usually prepared in advance to deal with hypothetical military operations. In a crisis situation, the planner's task is usually to retrieve an applicable TPFDD, and to change it to fit that new situation. The output of the process is a modified TPFDD which can be used in subsequent planning and operational activities. A typical TPFDD may contain hundreds of fields and hundreds of megabytes of data, but its focal point will always be a table of movement requirements with perhaps thousands of records describing the movement of all the units necessary to execute a plan. The planned movement of a unit, which may be as small as a single person or larger than a battalion, consists of three segments. In the first segment, a unit moves from its origin to a Port of Embarkation, or P.O.E. In the second segment, transportation is provided from the POE to a Port of Debarkation, or P.O.D. In the third segment, a unit moves from the POD to its f'mal destination. The FOEs and PODs may be airports, sea ports, Air Force bases, or other kinds of locations. The transportation from POE to POD may be by land, sea, or air. This transportation segment is usually of most interest to TRANSCOM planners. 1 DART is sponsored by DARPA and Rome Laboratory and involves BBN, Ascent Technologies, ISX Corporation, MITRE Corporation, and SRA Corporation.