Joint User-Centered Planning Artificial Intelligence Tools Effective Mission Reasoning (JUPITER)

Effective mission planning is critical for military strategy and execution. This process is complex as human operators must consider many variables (e.g., resource limitations, threats, risks) when formulating a plan to accomplish mission goals. Although powerful tools, such as the Navy’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), provide advanced functionality, mission planning remains a hybrid activity across human operators and mission planning tools. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can facilitate an improved mission planning process. To effectively integrate these technologies into mission planning, under a Phase I effort, we designed and demonstrated Joint User-centered Planning Artificial Intelligence Tools for Effective Mission Reasoning (JUPITER), an AI-based mission planning framework founded on joint cognitive system principles united with an advanced library of AI/ML capabilities for effective and efficient mission planning. Under Phase II, we will expand prior analyses to identify opportunities for AI methods to support the mission planning process, such as to overcome individual bias, discover hidden alternatives, and offload extensive manual processing and analysis of low-level information. The results of these analyses will be the expansion and refinement of the overall AI framework for joint human/AI mission planning. Finally, we will expand the breadth and depth the JUPITER prototype to demonstrate and evaluate these approaches.