A Knowledge Acquisition Tool for Course of Action Analysis

Abstract

We present the novel application of a general-purpose knowledge-based system, SHAKEN, to the specific task of acquiring knowledge for military Course of Action (COA) analysis. We show how SHAKEN can capture and reuse expert knowledge for COA critiquing, which can then be used to produce high-level COA assessments through declarative inference and simulation. The system has been tested and evaluated by domain experts, and we report on the results. The generality of the approach makes it applicable to task analysis and knowledge capture in other domains. The primary objective of this work is to demonstrate the application of the knowledge acquisition technology to the task of COA analysis. Developing a system deployable in an operational environment is the subject of future work.