An ISR Asset Planning Application

In many reconnaissance and surveillance tasks, the challenge is to deploy a considerable set of assets in the best manner for satisfying a set of given information requirements. 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, an operator assigns to each target on which reconnaissance or surveillance has to be performed a set of suitable assets. The operator may assign the suitable assets to a target either directly, based on his experience and knowledge, or supported by an intelligent multi-agent system, which generates automatically an asset assignment proposal. The multi-agent system consists of three types of intelligent agents, a target agent representing the targets on which reconnaissance or surveillance has to be performed, the asset agents representing the assets available to the operator, and an interface agent responsible for the communication with the other components of the application.
In the second step an automatic planning component may be used for computing an optimal asset assignment and execution order. Mathematically, the second step corresponds to an optimization problem under a considerable set of constraints. More precisely, the problem at hand possesses distinctive similarities to certain problem classes considered in the Operations Research domain, in particular to routing problems like Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). Thereby, customers in a VRP correspond to information requirements and vehicles in a VRP correspond to assets, here. Using these similarities, we worked out a mathematical formalization for the problem underlying the second step of our approach.