Plan Understanding & Mission Assessment (PUMA) Navy STTR FY2005 Sol No.: Navy STTR FY2005 Topic No.: N05-T017 Topic Title: Plan Understanding & Mission Assessment (PUMA) Proposal No.: N054-017-0442 Firm: Smart Information Flow Technologies, d/b/a SIFT 211 N 1st St. Suite 300 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401-1480 Contact: Robert Goldman Phone: (612) 339-7438 Web Site: www.sift.info Abstract: Two technologies with nearly perfect complementary capabilities are combined in this project. Univer-sity of Virginia has developed the Tactical Interface for Monitoring and Retargeting (TIMR), based on recent Tactical Tomahawk work. This provides decision aiding and an underlying simulation platform, but by design provides no autonomous planning capability. SIFT has developed PlaybookT, an intelli-gent autonomy capability for multiple, heterogeneous unmanned vehicle management, with sophisticated abilities to suggest near-optimal plans through constraint relaxation in overconstrained situations, but minimal capabilities for execution monitoring and intervention. In this project, we integrate Playbook and TIMR to create a Plan Understanding and Mission Assessment (PUMA) system. Playbook, and the associated task and resource models for execution, provide a controllable level of autonomy in PUMA, which will allow examination of the utility of these tools under various autonomous capability scenarios. Benefits: It has been repeatedly shown that certain forms of automation can reduce not only human performance capabilities, but also the performance of the human-automation system as a whole. When a single error can have far-reaching political and economic consequences, as is increasingly true in our asymmetric op-erations, this is unacceptable. PUMA will provide the capability to design and develop a range of tools that will allow the mission manager for unmanned vehicles to understand the current mission plan, and understand the consequences of actions that modifications to plan specification have on the outcome. This is critical for military operations, border security, and search and rescue operations, each of which is expanding their use of unmanned vehicles to fill disparate roles. Return