Support for agile planning & execution of coordinated actions Topic 9 : C 2 Architectures and Technologies

Planning, training and execution of defense missions is a process with a high degree of task breakdown and collaboration. In many cases these plans exist only in textual form and have to be broken down into discrete actions with significant manual effort. This paper presents a tool called “Collaborative Task Manager” (CTM), which enables modeling, exchange, and reuse of user-defined task structures, derived from such plans in an easy-to-use manner. Users’ working tasks can be created and managed ad-hoc in hierarchical action lists in the individual users’ workspaces. Users can further delegate tasks over email. Individual actions on tasks in the personal workspaces and task delegations are tracked on a central server, to integrate the personal task hierarchies of all process participants to end-to-end processes. This enables transparency into parties involved in a process, their tasks, and the status thereof. Reuse of process experience is enabled through so called “task patterns”. These can be extracted from executed ad-hoc processes or created from scratch as best-practice recommendations. Task patterns, as alternative to textual mission and training plans, represent adaptable, reusable building blocks of collaborative processes. They can be used to construct task hierarchies for complex collaborative processes.