Dynamic Air Battle Planning

An air tasking order (ATO) implements air operations supporting the joint force commander's campaign by assigning aircraft and munitions to targets and specifying the timing and grouping of air missions. Currently, creating an ATO is a routine, but manually intensive process that underutilizes the skills of the Master Air Attack Plan (MAAP) chief and his or her team. The current ATO creation software employs constraint-based linear programming and indicates only if a proposed mission is valid; it does not identify whether the ATO is the optimal plan given the MAAP team's objectives, target list, and available inventories of aircraft and munitions. Software engineers from 21st Century Technologies (Austin, Texas) are developing two products— ATO-Link and ATO-Stream—to automate and optimize the ATO creation process, shorten the ATO development cycle to minutes, and reduce mundane planning work. AFRL's Small Business Innovation Research program is administering both project efforts.