Collaboration technology for crisis management

The ARPA and Rome Laboratory Knowledge-based Planning and Scheduling Initiative has created intelligent decision aids and a collaborative infrastructure that enables a revolutionary new model of military planning. An initial implementation of this distributed collaborative planning environment is being used and evaluated in operational exercises to evolve a process for crisis response in which human and computational agents alternately initiate and control planning activities. These evaluations have revealed requirements for new collaboration technology for effectively using large, complex, and distributed information resources, for coping with very many collaborators, areas of expertise, and modalities of collaboration, for surmounting barriers of time and space, and for creating and exploiting intelligent collaboration agents