Database support for collaborative battle planning

Battle planning is a collaborative effort involving decision-making and war gaming at different levels of the command structure. It is an iterative process requiring that appropriate views of the battlefield be conveyed to all the participants of the planning process. This paper details the issue of database support for the collaborative battle planning environment that permits participants to interact with one another in a group battle-planning task by manipulating artifacts in their workspace. Complexity is added by the necessity to add legacy components to the system while permitting the users of the system to meaningfully participate in this collaborative environment and still maintain the integrity of the data. The data model is detailed and system architecture is described. The data server component provides an interface via a data API that provides the functions to authenticate clients, create and store database objects, and access objects and their values. System level details and data issues in collaborative planning are discussed in the paper.