An ISR asset planning application: Software architecture and components

The comprehensive and efficient supply of information to the armed forces is an essential prerequisite for making the right decisions regarding the further course of action based on knowledge of the situation in the area of interest. Reconnaissance and surveillance assets are employed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels to provide effective information. A well-thought-out use of the sensory information potential, which brings the most suitable sensors in the most favorable combination to the right place at the right time, ensures optimal success in the timely detection of situations with potential danger, given the usually scarce resources. The criteria for optimal deployment are the reconnaissance objectives, the prioritized information needs of the responsible force commander, and the capabilities of the sensor carriers and sensors and their readiness for deployment. Sensor deployment occurs in allied forces as a result of the IRM & CM (Information Requirements Management and Collection Management) process. In this process, starting from the "Commander's Critical Information Requirements (CCIR)" within the IRM part of the process, the "Prioritized Information Requirements (PIR)" are derived by means of refinement, from these the "Specialized Information Requirements (SIR)" and from these again the "Essential Elements of Information (EEI)" are derived. The EEIs are then ultimately transformed into "Collection Requirements" and processed in the CC part of the process. The "Collection Requirements" specify what kind of information is needed for which "Area of Interest" at what time and in what quality. The established "Collection Requirements" must then be processed in an "ISR Management" process in such a way that the appropriate and available sensor carriers are used with the appropriate sensor technology to perform the required reconnaissance. The ISR manager responsible for this process must consider not only the requirements resulting from the "Collection Requirements", but also the capabilities and status of the available assets (sensor carriers, sensors, endurance, etc.). This includes responding to dynamic changes during the mission, e.g., failure of a sensor or sensor carrier during reconnaissance of a high-priority target, resulting in the need to redirect a suitable sensor carrier and sensor from a lower-priority reconnaissance target. The paper at hand presents an approach for an optimal planning of ISR asset deployment in order to satisfy the information needs of a commander. Based on the processes of information requirements management (IRM) and collection management (CM), a two-step approach has been developed. In the first step, a set of suitable assets is assigned to each target on which reconnaissance or surveillance has to be performed. The assignment of suitable assets may be done by an operator directly, based on his experience and knowledge, or supported by an asset selection assistant component of the application, or the operator may choose to delegate the asset selection to an automatic component comprised of intelligent software agents performing the selection task for him. In the second step an automatic asset assignment and execution order is computed. The SW-Architecture of the application is a layered architecture; each layer captures and groups application specific aspects and details the components of the layer.