A new approach to military operations, called Anticipatory Planning and Adaptive Execution, treats planning and execution as a tightly coupled, single process, and replaces reaction to events with anticipation of events. The Anticipatory Planning process accounts for the chaotic nature of warfare in which possibilities appear and disappear. With new information technologies, military planners should be able to plan faster and better. An Anticipatory Planning Support System has been designed and implemented to provide an automated mechanism for assisting commanders and their staff in producing plans and evaluating scenarios. The APSS provides the human planners with an interactive visual development system to build Plan Descriptions around Nodes that represent option points in the plan and the Branches that represent the transitions between those option points. The APSS uses underlying simulations to assist in plan construction and evaluation. For testing or training purposes, an exter...
John R. Surdu, John M. D. Hill, Udo W. Pooch