What AI Can Do for Battle Management: A Report of the First AAAI Workshop on AI Applications to Battle Management

article uses this paper as its basis and includes workshop discussion comments. The purpose of this first battle management (alias, BatMan) workshop was to come up with three lists: (1) what problem-solving battle-management tasks the AI community knows technically how to do; (2) what tasks we can’t do and have little hope of doing before 1997; and (3) what tasks we think we might know how to do, but it’s still too soon to tell. Abstracts I received for the workshop didn’t fall easily into these categories but were representative in their problem-solving tasks. So I put forth my version of these lists to stimulate discussion at the workshop and to provide an impetus for presenters to tailor their presentations along lines that agreed or disagreed with the lists. I first held a short discussion of requirements. I expected (perhaps erroneously) that there would be little argument among the workshop attendees about the main battle-management functions. Then I presented my lists with some justification and rationale for them. Several statements were unqualified. If everyone agreed, then they would serve as absolutes; if not, I hoped to get qualifications or, better, counter-arguments at the workshop. The workshop attendees seemed to work well with the threelist format. As expected, a good deal espite the flurry of indignant notes across the Arpanet following the call for participation, there were no picketers or hecklers at the first AAAI workshop on AI Applications to Battle Management. About 30 people gathered at the University of Washington’s South Campus Center on Thursday of the week of the national AAAI conference in July 1987 to discuss the use of AI technologies in battle management. A representative cross section of agencies gave presentations: the AI centers at SRI International, General Electric (GE), Texas Instruments, and the MITRE Corporation’s Washington C3I division; Advanced Decision Systems (ADS); Rome Air Development Center (RADC); the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL); the Admiralty Research Establishment (ARE) in Hampshire, England; and Dartmouth College. There were on-lookers from several of these agencies as well as from Unisys, the Rand Corporation, the Army’s training and doctrine and materiel development commands, Lockheed, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA Lieutenant Colonel Robert Simpson), and Ford Aerospace. As the conference organizer, I prepared a point paper on what I thought the status was of the application of AI to battle management to focus the presentations and discussions. This The following is a synopsis of the findings of the first AAAI Workshop on AI Applications to Battle Management held at the University of Washington, 16 July 1987. The workshop organizer, Pete Bonasso, sent a point paper to a number of invited presenters giving his opinion of what AI could and could not do for battle management . This paper served as a focus for the workshop presentations and discussions and was augmented by the workshop presentations; it can also serve as a roadmap of topics for future workshops. AI can provide battle management with such capabilities as sensor data fusion and adaptive simulations. Also, several key needs in battle management will be AI research topics for years to come, such as understanding free text and inferencing in real time. Finally, there are several areas—cooperating systems and terrain reasoning, for example—where, given some impetus, AI might be able to provide help in the near future. D