New graphical techniques for strategic and tactical planning

The authors present novel interactive graphical techniques for performing US Air Force planning tasks such as deploying aircraft and weapons against desired targets, determining the availability of resources, performing a cost-benefit analysis to improve resource utilization, and coordinating interdependent missions. The most fundamental aspect of force-level planning is that it is an iterative process, during each cycle of which it is important to be able to visualize the interdependence among the decision variables, and to be able to gauge the impact of modifying specific decisions. Traditional text-based techniques deny the planner the power of the interactive graphical medium for visualizing these dependencies, and for gauging the impact of proposed changes. In contrast, the proposed techniques help the planner to understand arbitrary fragments of the current state of the mission plans, and incrementally improve them to achieve tactical objectives.<>