Improved Decision Making Through Simulation-Based Planning

Real-time military planning and decision making involve several different modeling techniques, including rule-based, operator-based, and dynamic-model based approaches. While rule-based approaches are generally fast and are more appropriate for simple scenarios, simulation methods and dynamic models, indigenous to the simulation literature, are necessary to plan within environments involving large-scale uncertainty, multiple interacting elements and complex dynamics. Planning techniques must inter-operate to yield the best decisions, and we have found that simulation-based planning serves as an architecture for detailed model levels for both real-time and off-line decision making. We introduce simulation-based planning as a methodology for addressingthe complexity involved in Air Force missions while employing an example of air interdiction.