Determining Course of Action Alignment with Operational Objectives

摘要

During the military planning process, commander's intent and objectives are defined and courses of action (COAs) are developed, analyzed and compared to determine their likelihood of achieving the intent and objectives. For each mission, thousands of COAs could be automatically generated but only those in alignment with commander's objectives are worth investigating. The challenge is to be able to automatically determine alignment, given that there is a semantic gap for a specific pair of objective and COA. The two not only differ syntactically, but also semantically. In this research, we made two specific contributions towards developing a solution to this problem. First, we discovered that classic symbolic reasoning does not work in developing such a solution, as the semantics involved are always fuzzy and inexact. Second, under the assumptions that both the operational objective and the COAs are represented in a low level semantic hierarchy (such that there is a syntax to represent them in terms of languages), we developed a solution that identifies their alignment as well as divergence. This paper presents results of this research, along with results from testing the proposed solution on a small, handcrafted ontology.