A special issue of International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences
The growing use of autonomous air, surface, ground and underwater systems is continually demonstrating new military and commercial possibilities and applications. The technology for, and capabilities of, unmanned vehicles (UVs) have leapt dramatically ahead in the past two decades, going from concept to operational systems. However, relatively little progress has been seen in the development of decision support systems that help the operators prioritise, plan, schedule and adapt these vehicles for a wide variety of functions and environments.
Typical mission planning systems do little more than show data to us, as opposed to displaying the impact of that data on a proposed mission or further to provide a systematic framework for the exploration, creation and evaluation of potential mission plans that meet specified objectives. Unmanned vehicles, particularly those with high levels of autonomy inferring infrequent human control, are unique in that much more planning is needed ahead of time than for manned missions. These vehicles have neither the sensors nor the decision making sophistication required to assess the environment and its impact on the mission, so many of the eventualities must be planned for prior to a mission using the best knowledge available.
Today, this task is typically managed in an ad-hoc fashion with little support from computers tailored to provide analytical analysis, and often requires significant expertise and manpower to successfully field these systems. To make the deployment of UVs more manageable and less expensive, advances need to be made in decision support software systems that can provide a consistent and systematic approach to the analysis of the myriad of considerations for the generation of plans to meet stated objective and subjective mission goals.
The objective of this call for papers is to establish an initial baseline on the state of the art of decision support systems for unmanned vehicles that will allow the community to chart a clear course forward.
This special issue is a forum for exchange of research findings, analysis, information, and knowledge in areas which include but are not limited to:
- Analysis, design, development and implementation of decision support systems for UVs
- Fielded UV decision support systems
- Common UV command and control system design that will enable the application of generalised decision support systems
- Approaches to the reduction of the UV mission planning state space to a manageable size in which traditional path planning approaches can then be used to find 'optimal' solutions
- Dynamic mission planning and execution
- Mixed initiative methods and approaches in human-machine decision making
Deadline for paper submission: 29 May, 2009
Notification of acceptance: 25 September, 2009
Final version of paper: 15 January, 2010
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