TRANSWAY: Planning with the Tabu Search Algorithm

Military deployment and distribution responsibilities call for intelligent collaborative tools in support of strategic and operational planning functions involving the sustainment and movement of military forces. The sustainment requirement is generated at the operational level and is dynamic. It is composed of shifting priorities responding to changes in commander’s intent and changes in the operational situation. The TRANSWAY software application is designed as a set of intelligent collaborative tools supporting operators performing planning and re-planning tasks in a dynamically changing decision-making environment. TRANSWAY includes several agents with strategic and operational planning and re-planning capabilities. The principal agent is based on the Tabu Search algorithm, with the intent of finding an optimum plan for the delivery of supplies from multiple origins, through multiple routes, with different kinds of conveyances, to multiple destinations, within specified time and resource constraints. The TRANSWAY System Architecture The TRANSWAY system has a three-tier, service-oriented architecture, implemented using the Integrated Cooperative Decision Making (ICDM) ontology-based software development framework and the Hibernate object/relational persistence and query service. Figure 2.1 provides an illustration of the key components within each of these tiers (i.e., presentation, information, and logic tiers). TRANSWAY incorporates an internal information model (i.e., ontology) consisting of objects, their characteristics, and the relationships among those objects. The information model is a virtual representation of the real world domain under consideration and is designed to provide adequate context for software agents (typically rule-based) to reason about the current state of the virtual environment. Since information-centric software has some ‘understanding’ of what it is processing it normally contains tools rather than predefined solutions to predetermined problems. These tools are commonly software agents that collaborate with each other and the human user(s) to develop solutions to problems in near real-time as they occur. Communication between information-centric applications is greatly facilitated since only the changes in information need to be transmitted. This is made possible by the fact that the object, its characteristics and its relationships are already known by the receiving application. The presentation tier interfaces with human operators through a Graphic User-Interface (GUI) comprised of a menu system, map display, agent display, and various reports. The main TRANSWAY GUI is based on the Generic Space Generator (GSG) framework employing Java Bean technology and offering high performance map and graphics management. The map display