Type of Research: Academic research funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Summary:
This paper is a precursor of work done by Ferguson et. al. (see Sketching for Military Courses of Action Diagrams. Forbus; Usher; Chapman (2003)) that summarizes the work by the Qualitative Reasoning Group of Northwestern University that was funded by DARPA. This project was involved with the “digitization” (in the words of Ken Forbus) of certain staff functions performed by the G2 and S2 officer of a division or corps (see U. S. Army Field Manual Fm 101-5: Staff Organization and Operations).

A typical Course of Action (COA) diagram taken from Qualitative Spatial Interpretation of Course-of- Action Diagrams. Caption: Figure 4: Example from a Course-of-Action diagram. Three friendly brigade-level task forces attack three enemy positions. The main attack is against objective Buford, and the supporting attack is against objective Grant.

Ferguson et. al. constructed two COA diagram interpreters using their qualitative spatial reasoning engine, GeoRep (see GeoRep: A Flexible Tool for Spatial Representation of Line Drawings. Ferguson; Forbus (2000)). The first system used GeoRep to interpret individual COA glyphs (unit icons and movement orders). The second system then used GeoRep to describe geographic relationships implied by the symbol arrangements. This allows the program to respond to questions such as: What coa-object is located on/at coa-area? Or what is ordinal direction of coa-obj1 relative to coa-obj2?

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