Representing multi-national rules of engagement using ontologies and rules as constraints for courses of action

The planning of courses of action for a task force component requires the evaluation of the available options and their respective impact to the operational goals. This includes considering the rules of engagement (ROE), i.e. the directives that define the circumstances and conditions in which force, or actions, which might be construed as provocative, may be applied. These rules vary across nations and are usually presented in manuals that require interpretation, requiring an often-complex decision process. In this paper, the problem of refining the decisions on a course of action based on the automated execution of rules of engagement is approached. An ontology representing the rules and a generic situation scenario is described, and the approach is evaluated by the encoding of the San Remo set of rules of engagement.