ABSTRACT
A key step towards development of a DSS is to understand the components of planning. A comprehensive mission planning problem involves Boethius’ who, what, why, how, where, when, with what (Han et al., 2013), implying who has the expertise to make the plan (DMs who may be humans or autonomous agents), what needs to be planned (tasks, jobs, and actions to be executed), why make the plan, how to achieve the expected outcome (the assignment of assets to tasks), where the plan is executed, when the plan is executed including for how long, and with what facilities to make the plan (the DSS), as shown in Figure 9.1. Although the existing DSSs process data to decisions, they are inundated with too much data, resulting in cognitive overload of DMs and increased probability of mission failure. This requires the DMs to spend a large amount of time in identifying and
interpreting the mission context, which is often cumbersome and errorprone. Motivated by the need to provide proactive decision support (PDS) to aid the modern war-fighters, in this chapter, we focus on two things: (a) identification of the key challenges in the development of PDS within a dynamic and uncertain mission environment; and (b) a brief discussion of solutions to address some of the PDS challenges within the maritime domain.
