Description

The Active Templates program (AcT) is developing a robust, lightweight software technology for aiding in the automation of detailed planning and execution for military operations and other highly-coordinated activities using a plan spreadsheet metaphor. Active Templates are distributed data structures whose variables can be linked to live data feeds or problem-solving methods. Active Templates assist with automated planning and execution by capturing, improving and updating critical information such as current state, goals, constraints, alternative actions, standard defaults, problem-solving context over time, decisions, and rationale. Active Templates are designed to be user-tailorable, networked, noise-tolerant, user-supported, scalable and widely adopted.

Within AcT, the Temple project is developing software tools to aid a user in adding new constraints to active templates. This work makes use of prior work on problem-solving methods and script-based acquisition for plan evaluation performed under HPKB and ARPI. We have developed the Constable system for examining and modifying constraints used while checking a plan, and demonstrated it for planning a SEAL beach infiltration.

More (Research)