Abstract

Real-time Symbolic Control of a C² Enterprise

Azad M. Madni, Ph.D.
Intelligent Systems Technology, Inc.

Abstract

Real-time enterprise management and control is a continuing challenge facing the C² community. Much of the R&D to date has centered around AI-based techniques for planning and scheduling with limited work on intelligent process management that integrates planning and execution. Today there has been a surge of interest in control-theoretic approaches that offer formal methods and metrics to evaluate system properties such as controllability and stability - characteristics which are crucial for mission-critical applications. Along with this interest has come the challenge of extending control-theoretic concepts to the domain of symbolic control.

This paper presents a symbolic control formulation of military C² operations. This formulation adapts and combines key concepts and technologies from control theory, decision theory, agent-based systems, dynamic programming and fast-time simulation. The paper identifies potential sources of instability and presents an experimentation framework for defining and investigating key properties such as controllability and stability of a symbolic control system. Two illustrative examples are presented. The first illustrates a representative set of transformations that are involved in symbolic control and suggests the use of complementary techniques from multiple disciplines in a way that exploits their respective strengths while overcoming their limitations. The second shows the mapping from a symbolic to a numeric domain for higher levels in the C² enterprise. Specific metrics for evaluating mission success are provided for each example.

From:

Madni, A.M., Proceedings of the Advances in Enterprise Control Symposium, San Diego, CA, November 15-16, 1999.