Flexible Task Resourcing In Dynamic Environments

In order to achieve a mission, human planners create plans, which divide the mission into tasks. In order to fulfill their goals, tasks require critical resources including sensor assets. Precise determination and timely allocation of these resources may be crucial to achieve the overall mission. Unfortunately, determining the resources necessary to achieve a task during planning involves many challenges. For example, the environment and conditions during the plan execution may not be correctly estimated during planning. If this is the case, the required resources should be promptly re-estimated and allocated during the plan execution to save the overall mission. In this paper, we propose a means to automate the determination of resources that are required to execute tasks. Our approach combines ontological reasoning and logic programming for a flexible matchmaking of resources to tasks. Using the proposed approach, intelligent agents can autonomously reason about the resources and tasks in various settings. In this way, agents can more effectively support both the process of planning and re-planning in mission-critical environments, and aid in the management of sensor assets that are essential to the success of such plans.