Collaborative and context-aware planning

Military commanders require precise command, control, and planning information available for a given mission, information that must be tailored for a particular area of operation, for a specific level of command, and for a specific time period. The problem of developing information of this kind is further complicated in a multi-national coalition setting where different components of a coalition plan are developed in semi-independent fashion, but then aggregated and composed to form an overall operational plan that is sufficiently flexible to support change as circumstances evolve. This paper will provide a foundation for context-aware and collaborative planning that will enable customized agents to traverse a diverse, distributed, frequently changing information space to identify relevant data. Once aware of the data, visual interfaces should provide the new information and facilitate understanding of changes among geographically distributed planners. As a first steps toward this vision we have developed a framework called Graphical Plan Authoring Language (G-PAL) that enables multiple distributed planners to collaboratively build plan components that can be composed later on to provide a global view of the plan. ©2008 IEEE.