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Automation within the ISR Collection Management domain

Conference Paper · May 2014

DOI: 10.1109/ICComm.2014.6866721

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 Automation within the ISR Collection Management
Domain
Cristian Coman* and Kurt Veum
NATO Communication and Information Agency,
Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, The Hague, The Netherlands
*
Corresponding author (E-mail : cristian.coman@ncia.nato.int)
Abstract—The paper discusses solutions for automation of the
Collection Management (CM) process in the Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) domain. The formulation
of the problem follows methodologies developed in the artificial
intelligence domain. An automated planning solution can
significantly reduce the time required to assign collection assets to
requirements and can better support the users by presenting
alternative plans. Examples are discussed in the context of
planning the collection of Full Motion Video (FMV) data in
support to operations.
Keywords-Planning; Scheduling; Artificial Intelligence;
Collection Management.
I. INTRODUCTION
The management functions within the Intelligence
Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) domain are mainly
covered by the Information Requirements Management and
Collection Management (IRM&CM) processes. IRM&CM
addresses the management of requirements and the
management of data collection as well. An overview of how
IRM&CM is implemented in NATO is presented in [1] and
new doctrinal development suggest that this covers both the
Intelligence Cycle and the ISR cycle In particular on ISR cycle
the planning of the utilization of the sensors is carried out by
different organizations and the efficiency of this approach is
sub-optimal in many practical situations.
The collection coordination or the Collection Management
(CM) includes management of ISR assets. These assets are
often seen as a combination of platforms and sensors. Therefor
the planning process consists of: planning of sensors (planning
of fulfilment of ISR collection requirements) and planning of
platform movements. The two planning problems are closely
connected in the sense that dynamic changes in one domain
affect the solution in the other domain.
In addition, the CM solution is commonly required to
satisfy multiple constrains (e.g. weather conditions, priority of
requirements, maintenance period) which are difficult to
properly account for through a manual process.
A common approach to deal with the complexity of
collection management problems is to solve them a
sequentially. First the “on station” period for the sensors is
defined, and then ISR collection requests are assigned to these
sensors’ “on station” periods based on the temporal attributes of
the request.
Solving scheduling and resource allocation problems has
been an important field of interest for various communities over
978-1-4799-2385-4/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
many years. In particular, the mathematics and artificial
intelligence (AI) communities have invested significant effort
in formulating real life problems into equivalent problems that
would facilitate the automation of the process of solving them.
Commonly, the scheduling theory is concerned with
scheduling of activities and allocation of resources to these
activities. Often the spatial information is used in military
scheduling and resource allocation problems.
A taxonomy of scheduling and resource allocation problems
is provided in [2]. Common examples that cover both
scheduling and resource allocation problems are job-shop
scheduling and project scheduling. The collection management
problem can be seen as a project scheduling problem where the
tasks are represented by requirements, the resources are
represented by available assets and the timeline of the project is
represented by the timeline of the operation.
Lessons learned in recent operations, indicate that the
number of collection requests (in particular for full motion
video support) is substantial and often it is infeasible to fulfill
all requests. Moreover, the availability of collection assets
depends on the area of collection, base location, maintenance
status, and weather. All of these elements will act as additional
objectives or constrains to the scheduling and resource
allocation problem.
Over past years commercial technologies have been
employed in solving scheduling problems in dynamic
environments [3]. Thus, these technologies are very relevant for
the collection management domain, where the complexity of
the planning problem and timely adaptation to disruptions that
can occur during the execution of collection plans are critical
for the success of operations.
The present contribution discusses the formulation of a
simplified CM problem in the framework of an automated
planning framework. The framework is derived from the
artificial intelligence domain and accounts for temporal aspects
of the collection requirements and the availability of collection
assets.
The account now proceeds with a detailed description of the
proposed design philosophy. Section II provides a brief
description of the ISR Collection Management Process. The
formulation of the CM planning problem is introduced in
Section III and conclusions are presented in Section IV.
 II. ISR COLLECTION MANAGEMENT
The intelligence cycle presented in Figure 1 identifies the
key steps in the process of information production. The
commander provide direction by stating his or her
Commander‘s Critical Information Requirements (CCIR). In
particular the Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) contain
the commander’s needs of information about adversary and in
general about non-cooperative elements of the battlespace.
Direction
illustration of this process is presented in Figure 3. As part of
the collection requirements management (CRM) stage the ISR
requests are gathered for the following day of operations into a
collection request list. The collection requirements are validated
and ranked in accordance with a predefined priority scheme.
The availability of assets in time and space and the
prioritized ISR requirements list are used by the collection
Manager to prepare the collection and exploitation plan. The
collection and exploitation plan contains relations between
assets and requirements. Once drafted, the plan is executed as
part of the Collection Operation Management (COM) process.
During the period until the plan is executed, ad-hoc
requirements are received and the plan shall be updated
accordingly. Moreover dynamic re-tasking may be required
during the execution of the plan.

Automated solutions are described in the literature for

solving most of these planning problems [4]. An important step
Production Collection
in these solutions is the development of a domain model that
comprises a representation of real world objects. . This domain
model is the basis for algorithms or inference engines.
A modelling approach applicable to the CM domain is
presented in the following section.
Processing

Figure 1. The intelligence cycle. III. CM AS A PLANNING PROBLEM

Common operating procedures recommend that the
requirements are grouped on product types (for example full
On the other side Requests for Information (RFIs) are motion video requirements, still imagery requirements etc.).
formulated by various communities and submitted to the This approach simplifies the matching of requirements to asset
intelligence management cell for processing. These types. The first planning step in the collection management
requirements are aligned with the commanders PIRs and further domain addresses the allocation of ISR requirements to
decomposed in Intelligence Requirements (IRs) within the collection assets. In practice this step is often simplified by
Intelligence Collection Plan (ICP). using predefined temporal and spatial attributes for both
requirements and assets.
ISR Requests Asset Availability
1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800
Asset_1
CRM
Asset_2
Asset_3
Collection Manager
Asset_4

Collection Plan a)

1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800

Ad-hoc and Asset_1 ISR_R_1

ISR OPS COM
Dynamic requests Asset_2 ISR_R_7 ISR_R_3
Asset_3 ISR_R_2
Reports Tasks
Asset_4 ISR_R_4

Assets b)
Figure 3. Development of the synchonization matrix: a) on station
Figure 2. ISR Collection Management process. intervals of collection assets; b) collection requirements allocated to
assets.

Often sensor data collection requirements are allocated to

ISR assets that, when collected and analyzed, answer IRs. In The temporal aspects are illustrated in Figure 2. The
addition, ISR assets are collecting sensor data that will directly representation of the plan by using a Gantt chart is referred to as
support operations. The entire set of collection requirements or the synchronization matrix. The availability of assets is
ISR Requests is processed by the Collection Manager. An indicated on this graph as a continuous time interval.
Requirements are assigned to assets in the priority order. It is
desirable that an asset on-station time is fully covered by
requirements. This objective can be used an optimization
criteria in the planning process.
Base_C Base_A
NAI_2
NAI_1
Base_B
Figure 4. Geospatial elements related to assests and to requirements.
The spatial aspects are also considered in the asset
allocation process. Often the ISR assets are assigned to a unit
that has an Area of Intelligence Responsibility. In Figure 4
three units are represented as military bases and their area or
responsibility is delimited by dashed lines. ISR Requirements
are often requirements for collection of sensor data from
smaller areas (Named Areas of Interest). Assignment of ISR
Requirements to Units is often determined by which Areas of
Intelligence Responsibility that the NAIs are contained within.
A. State Space Representation
A state space representation is proposed in this section to
support the planning process [4]. This representation is suitable
for solving a simplified CM problem where the temporary and
spatial aspects of requirements and assets are known. The state
representation of a planning problem can be seen as a tuple Σ =
(S,A,E,γ) where [4]:
• S = {s1,s2,…} is a set of states. In case of CM this can
be seen as partial or complete plan containing links
between a set of requirements and a set of available
assets.
• A = {a1,a2,…} is set of actions. Allocation of an asset
to a requirement can be seen as an action in this
context.
• E = {e1,e2,…} is a set of events. Events such as
weather conditions, maintenance problems or
commander directed allocation of assets shall also be
considered as part of the planning process.
• γ: S×(AUE)→2S is a state transition function. The CM
state transition function take a partial plan and assign
requirements to assets by using a planning strategy and
produce new plans (2S represents the power set of S
that maps to a set of states).
The state representation can be used to encode the planning
problem as a graph on which common search techniques can be
applied.
B. Automated solutions
Search techniques based on heuristic functions such as A*
graph can be used to find optimum solutions to planning
problems represented as state space. A search problem shall
have:
• An initial state, which can be an empty plan with no
links between assets and requirements;
• A set of possible actions/applicability conditions. This
is often implemented as a successor function, which
can identify all possible actions that are applicable to a
given state of the plan and the resulting states: state →
set of <action, state>
• A goal, which can be goal state or goal test function.
For CM a goal can be allocation of all requirements to
assets or allocation of all assets to requirements in case
the two are not equal.
• A path cost function, which can account for various
factors such as remaining on-station time not allocated
to requirements. The cost function can be used to
encode the criteria for defining an optimum solution.
A search algorithm encodes the elements presented in the
enumeration above into a computer program. A generic search
algorithm is presented in Figure 5. The search function is
initiated with a planning problem that contains a set of
prioritized requirements and a set of assets. A search strategy is
also provided to indicate how the nodes to be expanded next are
selected from a given state. Common strategies used in practice
are Last In First Out (LIFO), First In First Out (FIFO) or
priority queues.
function graphSearch(problem, strategy)
fringe = { new searchNode(problem.initialState) }
loop
if empty(fringe) then return failure
node = selectFrom(fringe, strategy)
if problem.goalTest(node.state) then
return plan = pathTo(node)
fringe = fringe + expand(problem, node)
Figure 5. Search algorithm in pseudo code.
Partial plans developed during the search process are stored
in a fringe. The algorithm contains a loop that produces a plan
or returns a fail message in case the fringe is empty and the
goals state was not found.
 IV. CONCLUSIONS
Automation of Collection Management activities has the
potential to solve large requirement-to-asset allocation
problems in the ISR domain. A state space representation is a
suitable solution for solving practical asset allocation tasks.
Search techniques and graph representation solutions from the
artificial intelligence domain can reduce significantly de
planning time and recommend optimum solutions to the
planning staff for consideration and approval. If optimum
cannot be found within the limited time available, a satisfactory
solution can be presented to the staff for further processing and
decision. A more elaborated plan-space representation offers
additional advantages (such as plan repair, re-planning or plan
monitoring) in solving dynamic planning problems caused by
ad-hoc requirements or dynamic re-tasking process.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research presented in this work greatly benefited from
discussions with the Multi-intelligence All-source Joint ISR
Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC 2) project community. The
innovative, enthusiastic and professional attitude of MAJIIC2
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team and their willingness to share knowledge are highly
appreciated.
DISCLAIMER
Any opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect
the views of the NCI Agency, NATO and the NATO Nations
but remain solely those of the author(s).
REFERENCES
[1] NATO Allied Command Transformation, “Collection Coordination and
Intelligence Requirements Management (CCIRM) handbook”, 06 May
2012.
[2] S.J. Noronha, V.V.S. Sarma, “Knowledge-Based Approaches for
Scheduling Problems: A survey”, IEEE Trans. On knowledge and data
engineering, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1991.
[3] Steven M. LaValle, “Planning Algorithms”, Cambridge University Press,
2006.
[4] Malik Ghallab, Dana Nau and Paolo Traverso, “Automated Planning:
Theory & Practice”, The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial
Intelligence, May 2004.