Airlift mission monitoring and dynamic rescheduling

We describe the Flight Manager Assistant (FMA), a prototype system, designed to support real-time management of airlift operations at the USAF Air Mobility Command (AMC). In current practice, AMC flight managers are assigned to manage individual air missions. They tend to be overburdened with associated data monitoring and constraint checking, and generally react to detected problems in a local, myopic fashion. Consequently, decisions taken for one mission can often have deleterious effects on others. FMA combines two key capabilities for overcoming these problems: (1) intelligent monitoring of incoming information (for example, weather, airport operations, aircraft status) and recognition of those situations that require corrective action and (2) dynamic rescheduling of missions in response to detected problems, both to understand the global implications of changed circumstances and to determine appropriate rescheduling actions. FMA builds on two existing technologies: an execution-monitoring framework previously applied to small-unit operations and control of robots, and a dynamic scheduling tool that is transitioning into operational use in AMC’s Tanker/Airlift Control Center. FMA’s dynamic-mediation module provides for collaborative mission management by different planning and execution offices by structuring communication for decision making. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.