Template-Based Planning Associate for Active Templates

摘要

The Active Templates program developed innovative planning tools for the Special Operations Forces community. These software tools were developed by several contractors. This report documents technology developed to help integrate those tools. Initially, a simple tool was developed for managing plans based on Plan and Goal Graphs. Applications could connect to this tool via sockets. Although the tool had a good set of functionality and was well received, it was clearly inadequate for the larger program. Using this tool as a base, a more sophisticated socket-based XML message passing tool, the Router, and a common data repository, the Plan Manager were developed. The two together constituted the Tool Interchange Manager (TIM). External to this effort, a set of database tables describing concepts shared among the tools was developed - the Structured Data Model (SDM). This effort was then tasked with maintaining the SDM. After off-the-shelf infrastructure was found to meet the infrastructure needs of the program, work was stopped on the TIM and efforts directed at creating an application to allow a higher-level commander to coordinate the finer-grained plans developed by the various Active Templates tools - the Plan Coordinator.