Collaborative effects-based planning using adversary models and target set optimization

The Strategy Development Tool (SDT), sponsored by AFRL-IFS, supports effects-based planning at multiple levels of war through three core capabilities: plan authoring, center of gravity (COG) modeling and analysis, and target system analysis. This paper describes recent extensions to all three of these capabilities. The extended plan authoring subsystem supports collaborative planning in which a user delegates elaboration of objectives to other registered users. A suite of collaboration tools allows planners to assign planning tasks, submit plan fragments, and review submitted plans, while a collaboration server transparently handles message routing and persistence. The COG modeling subsystem now includes an enhanced adversary modeling tool that provides a lightweight ontology for building temporal causal models relating enemy goals, beliefs, actions, and resources across multiple types of COGs. Users may overlay friendly interventions, analyze their impact on enemy COGs, and automatically incorporate the causal chains stemming from the best interventions into the current plan. Finally, the target system analysis subsystem has been extended with option generation tools that use network-based optimization algorithms to select candidate target set options to achieve specified effects.