Assessment of operation plan performance under uncertainty

A plan of military air operations contains a number of sequential and/or parallel tasks. Given information of the battlefield situation (including the status estimate of tasks) during the execution of a plan, it is necessary to assess the situation impact on the plan, especially whether the entire plan would be delayed. Plan performance assessment fuses the status estimate of tasks into the status estimate of the entire plan. The performance assessment of the plan assists the commander of air operations to decide the need for plan modification to assure the goal of air operations. The performance assessment of the plan must deal with uncertainty in the status estimate of tasks in the plan. This paper presents a comparative study of two information fusion techniques that infer the status estimate of a plan from the status estimate of tasks under uncertainty: the decomposition technique with low computational cost and the composition technique with high computational cost. The testing results of these techniques indicate the similar estimation accuracy of two techniques. Due to its low computational cost, the decomposition technique is recommended. Guidelines for applying the decomposition technique to a large-scale, complex plan of the tasks are also provided.