Effective Course-of-Action Determination to Achieve Desired Effects

An evolutionary algorithm-based approach to identify effective courses of action (COAs) in dynamic uncertain situations is presented. The uncertain situation is modeled using timed influence nets, an instance of dynamic Bayesian networks. The approach makes significant enhancements to the current trial-and-error-based manual technique, which is not only labor intensive but also not capable of modeling constraints among actionable events. The proposed approach is an attempt to overcome these limitations. It automates the process of COA identification. It also allows a system analyst to capture certain types of constraints among actionable events. Because of its parallel search nature, the approach produces multiple COAs that have a similar fitness value. This feature not only gives more flexibility to a decision maker during mission planning, but it can also be used to generalize the COAs if there exists a pattern among them. This paper also discusses a heuristic that further enhances the performance of the approach.