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Military plans validation is typically a long and costly process requiring planners to validate their plans using anticipated scenarios or through military exercises. While military exercises provide realistic simulation of the plan, it is often the most expensive way of validating a plan. On the other hand, although using anticipated scenarios is relatively cheaper, the robustness of the validated plans is dependent on the scenarios against which they are validated. This, in turn, depends on the experience of the planners that crafted the scenarios. This paper describes research on an alternative way of plans validation in the context of air defence done at Naval Postgraduate School as part of a postgraduate course of study. It explores the possibility of using a multi-agent system (MAS) to analyse air defence plan and generate potential air strike plans that exploit weaknesses in the air defence plan. The resulting plans are fed into a low resolution Discrete Event Simulation (DES) based air defence simulator to simulate the effects of the air strike plan against the air defence plan. A prototype was developed and has demonstrated the ability to validate air defence plans using MAS-generated strike plans and a low resolution DES-based simulator successfully., Proceedings of the International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (15th) (ICCRTS '10), Santa Monica, CA, June 22-24, 2010. The original document contains color images.

The current conduct of operations for peace keeping or disaster relief sees the increasing need for co-operation among different national agencies and nations, to collaborate and to maintain awareness of the status, capabilities, response plans and C2 resources. The urgency and scale of such missions bring forth the need for seamless transition to operation, as well as the need for better interoperability of the respective systems used among the national agencies and the coalition partners. This paper presents the exploration conducted by Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) on enhancing the integration between C2 and IT (such as, human resource and logistic) systems, as well as the interoperability between new and existing/legacy systems. In the exploration, DSTA uses Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM) as the referential data model for building an information hub, and encapsulated the hub with a set of open-standards based web services. The set of services offered a consistent way of accessing and updating the information hub, while maintaining the hub's integrity by enforcing the business rules defined in C2IEDM. In addition, the set of services also shields web service consumers from the complexity of the model. This paper will discuss on the information integration architecture, challenges encountered and the lessons learnt during the exploration, while putting the state of the art data model into practice., The original document contains color images. Presented at the Command and Control Research and Technology Syposium (2006 CCRTS) held in San Diego, CA on 20-22 Jun 2006. Published in the Proceedings of the Command and Control Research and Technology Syposium (2006 CCRTS) Jun 2006.