Intelligent information assistance for coalition operations

Abstract

The challenge of ensuring that the right information is available to the right personnel at the right time and in the right format is becoming increasingly important as military forces adopt a vision of Network Centric Warfare and Operations. This is particularly true in a dynamic environment with prevalent uncertainty, where various types and sources of information must be consulted while the information requirements change during planing and re-planning. The heterogeneity in doctrine and information systems inherent to coalition operations compounds this problem, particularly from the point of view of human users that must not only plan and execute missions but also keep in mind all potentially relevant sources of information, leading to cognitive overload. We have developed the ANTicipatory Information and Planning Agent (ANTIPA) [11] to manage information adaptively in order to mitigate user cognitive overload. To this end, the agent brings information to the user as a result of user requests, but, most crucially, it proactively predicts the user’s prospective information needs by recognizing the user’s plan; prefetches information that is likely to be used in the future; and offers the information when it is relevant to the current or future planning decisions. In this paper we review the ANTIPA architecture and describe potential applications of ANTIPA in coalition operations.