Automated strategic relocatable target mission planning

Relocatable targets add to the existing strategic mission planning problem because their locations are not precisely known and additional sensors are required for target search, identification, and location. Mission planners must select aircraft flight paths that provide the highest probability of finding, identifying, and destroying the targets, while minimizing aircraft risk and meeting all standard strategic mission planning criteria. The author describes the problem, an existing automated mission planning system, and the enhancements necessary to provide automated planning. The route planner uses heuristic or best-guess inputs to develop a search space that describes the costs of flying between candidate turnpoints. The strength of the heuristics determines the size of the search space explored and the resulting algorithm performance. Run-time heuristic definition provides real-time system performance on a variety of planning problems