Introduction | Graphical Display | Key | Information Screen

Introduction

ACP3 - the Air Campaign Planning Process Panel - provides an overview of the status of the workflow during the development of one or more Courses Of Action (COAs). It shows the status of a number of tools being used to develop and evaluate the alternative COAs.

The Overall workflow can be shown in an aggregate way, and the individual workflow on each COA is summarized in the column for the COA. Drill down to the next level of detail of the workflow status is possible from suitable (expandable) nodes in the grapical display or from the Workflow Status row of the COA matrix.

Three types of status display are maintained:

  1. a graphical display which can be selected to be show the overall aggregate workflow.
  2. a tabular COA matrix showing the workflow status for the development of each individual COA.
  3. an agenda list of outstanding work to do for each COA or for the overall development of all COAs. As well as allowing the status of running processes and inter-agent interactions to be monitored and displayed, the design provides a basis for acting as a Process Control Panel in future. Authority management methods can be incorporated to manage human and automatd agents who may act in a mixed initiative fashion with the framework, while operating on a number of different COAs which are under development.

    The concepts for ACP3 are derived from the O-P3 (Open Planning Process Panel) as used to interface to the ARPI O-Plan Project's Web Server.

    Graphical Display

    In the Graphical Display, branching points in the process are described as follows:

    COA Matrix and Color Key

    Triangle symbols are used to indicate which process steps can be shown in greater detail. Colors are used to indicate the status of execution of the various process steps:

    Expandable
    Expanded
    Complete
    Executing
    Possible
    Impossible
    Not Ready
      N/A  

    Possible means that the the preconditions or triggers for the step are satisfied and the step can be started at any time.

    Impossible means that some precondition or trigger for the step has failed to be put in place, so the step cannot be executed without some alteration to the process.

    N/A means "Not Applicable". This is a process step, or tool/agent facility that cannot be appplied. E.g. a Plan comparison can only be done on two or more COAs. N/A could also appear to "gray out" a conditional part of the process that has not been selected following earlier decisions.

    Information Screen

    The main ACP3 display is always in the main browser window, information and help screens are sent to a second "ACP3 Information" window, which after it appears can be adjusted to a suitable size and left to one side of the main display.


    AIAI
    ACP3 Air Campaign Planning Process Panel
    Based on O-P3 - O-Plan Technology from ARPI