Hybrid Qualitative Simulation of Military Operations

Abstract

Our goal is to enable military planners to rapidly critique alternative battle plans by simulating multiple outcomes of adversarial plans. We describe a novel simulator, SimPath, that combines qualitative reasoning, a geographic information system (GIS), and targeted probabilistic calculations to envision how adversarial battle plans can play out. We outline the problem and describe the overall operation of the simulator. We then explain how qualitative process theory is extended with actions to model military tasks, how envisioning is factored to reduce combinatorial explosions, and how probabilities are computed for transitions and used to filter possibilities. Empirical results, including an experiment conducted by an independent evaluator, are summarized. The results show that it is possible to identify dozens of possible outcomes on each of 9 combinations of adversarial plans (COAs) in under two minutes. We close with a discussion of future work.