Mission Planning

Requirements Summary

The Mission Planner was originally perceived as the Strategic Planner, providing low observable routes to the mission objectives, and monitoring  the aircraft progress on that route, ensuring that the fuel availability was consistent with completing the mission, adn replanning when the pilot deviates from the mission route. It was responsible for:

• developing safe, low-observable routes based on the capabilities of threat systems that were pre-briefed, together with any extra threats discovered during the mission, and the observability of the aircraft.
• maintaining a safe egress plan at all times, 
• monitoring the aircraft progress along the proposed route, and
• replanning the route as necessary as the mission requirements or mission situation changes.

LASC Marietta was the lead agency for developing both the Phase 1 and Phase 2 implementations of the Mission Manager.

Phase 1 Implementation

The core of the Mission Planner was a Dynamic Programming engine dubbed "ZAP" that was written in C and hosted on a Sun workstation.  The logic for processing system messages, maintaining the threat data base and invoking the planning algorithm was hosted on a Symbolics machine. 

Phase 2 Implementation

In Phase 2, the major changes to the Mission Planner resulted from the real-time requirement.  While the Phase 1 ZAP algorithm was reasonably quick, producing an answer in about 3 seconds, a significant speed improvement was needed to accomplish real-time route updates.  The algorithm was extensively modified, renamed the High-Speed Directed Graph Optimizer (HSDGO), and hosted on special hardware able to produce a new solution in 100 milliseconds.  Optimality of the routes used a weighted average of the fuel/time cost and threat exposure.  The pilot in the pre-mission briefing could specify these weights in order to manage the risk level of the routes.  The remainder of the logic, as with the other subsystems, was recoded in C++ and hosted on 680X0 boards in the VME chassis.

Since the HSDGO board produced optimal routes from the current aircraft location to all other points in space, the Mission Planner was able to assume another powerful role as a support function to the Tactics Planner supplying tactical trajectories for offensive or defensive maneuvers.  For example, if the Tactics Planner was considering attacking a certain target, it provided a selection of possible launch points to the Mission Planner and received immediately a proposed trajectory and an assessment of its merits.

last updated 10/5/2002 by David Smith