Designing Collaborative Automated Planners for Agile Adaptation to Dynamic Change

Abstract

A common characteristic of domains that require planning for allocation of scarce resources is the need to dynamically revise the plan as new requirements emerge and priorities change. We describe a prototype decision support system for planning and scheduling airlift that we developed for a military transport organization that enables agile plan adaptation as movement requirements, available airlift assets, and priorities change. The collaborative automated scheduler includes visualizations to foster improved situation awareness of available airlift assets versus total demand on those assets; mechanisms to enable users to communicate informal priorities and changes to those priorities; and mechanisms that enable users to explore alternative scheduling options in response to changes in movement requirements, priorities and available assets. A formal user evaluation study that included 12 participants representing three different organizational groups involved in transportation planning provided evidence that the prototype improves the ability to capture and communicate movement priorities, rapidly reallocate airlift assets to accommodate changes, and communicate/collaborate across organizational boundaries in managing airlift demand versus capacity.