N092-096 TITLE: Intelligent Agents for Automated Planning and Scheduling of Aviation Weapon Handling Aboard Aircraft Carriers

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Air Platform, Information Systems, Ground/Sea Vehicles, Materials/Processes, Weapons

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: PMA-251, Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment, ACAT IV

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Develop intelligent agent technologies to assist naval personnel in the planning and scheduling of aviation weapon movement aboard aircraft carriers.

DESCRIPTION: Aviation weapon handling on aircraft carriers and other air capable ships plays a crucial role in sortie generation and combat effectiveness of the ship. It is essentially a manufacturing process that includes inventory control, configuration control, assembly and inspection, transportation, and delivery. Weapons are transported from the magazine to the flight deck and onto the aircraft to support each day�s flight operations ("strike-up"); transported from a supply ship during an underway replenishment; and stpwed in the magazine to support strike-up and flight operations ("onload/offload" or "strike-down"). The strike-up process can be a major barrier to increasing the tempo of operations and sortie generation rate, a fact borne out in recent simulated surge exercises. While there are information systems for inventory and tracking, planning and managing these processes is an "artform" that requires specialized expertise and is not flexible enough to respond on-the-fly to changes in circumstances, such as a down elevator or a change in mission. In addition, it takes a long time to gather the data necessary and plan the various moves. Planning an onload/offload currently takes days to accomplish.

Intelligent agent technology for just-in-time strike-up and onload/offload could greatly improve these processes. A decision-aid system would need to consider all aspects associated with the weapons'''' current stowage location and peculiar attributes, breakout and build support requirements, status of the carrier�s weapon elevators, potential strike-up path hindrances, alternate weapon availability, and breakout to delivery time forecasting. The technology would need to collect, interpret, and process the information into a knowledge base that can be used to support and automate the decision making processes associated with weapon planning. No algorithm currently exists that can be applied to this specific and complicated application. The innovative R&D required in this effort will be the development of intelligent technology that will provide the warfighter with the capability to improve the efficiency of the weapon planning activity. Unique software that captures the knowledge of expert weapons handlers is necessary to implement an efficient decision aid architecture. The software aids should operate in a service oriented architecture (SOA) or enterprise service bus (ESB) and be able to provide crew relief by automating some tasks within the weapon fulfillment process while maintaining overall crew situation awareness, process observability, and plan repair capabilities. In addition, the tools should be able to address workflow variations in real-time among weapon department in different ships and Ordinance Handling Officer (OHO) process priorities. Finally, the software aids should provide alternative plans for the selection of weapon components, manufacturing locations and use of support equipment based on user specified optimization criteria.

Concepts that can integrate to existing shipboard operations and minimize impact to ship systems will be given higher consideration. Proposals that address certain aspects of this problem, such as applied research into SOA, ESB, automated software assistants, artificial intelligence methods for planning and scheduling, and business process management techniques will be considered.

PHASE I: Determine the feasibility of designing and implementing weapon department software aids. Identify weapon department workflows and steps used in fulfilling weapon load requests. Identify key technology risk areas.

PHASE II: Develop a fully integrated design and prototyping environment. Develop detailed algorithms, application scenarios, and software prototypes and evaluate via simulation. Optimize software aid designs and capabilities based on test data and subject matter expert feedback. Provide complete documentation of algorithms, and software and hardware architecture components.

PHASE III: Produce a full-scale robust decision support and process management tool capable of addressing planning and scheduling of aviation weapons aboard aircraft carriers and other air capable ships. The tool should be able to support the handling of discrete events and schedule its fulfillment in a continuous time scale while ensuring overall process performance and stability.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Manufacturing, cargo transportation logistics, vehicle fleet asset scheduling and location planning, warehouse management.

REFERENCES:
1. W. Shen. "Distributed Manufacturing Scheduling Using Intelligent Agents," IEEE Intelligent Systems. Volume 17, Issue 1, Jan/Feb 2002, pp. 88-94.

2. M. Wooldridge, An Introduction to Multiagent Systems. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2002.

3. I. Seilonen et.al., "Modeling Cooperative Control In Process Automation With Multi-Agent Systems." 2nd IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics, June 2004. pp. 260- 265.

KEYWORDS: Intelligent Agents; Automated Planning; Scheduling; Aviation Weapons; Handling; Aircraft Carriers;

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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