This report summarizes the results of a short-term project aimed at demonstrating the applicability of the DITOPS scheduling system [5][4][3] to the air medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) re-planning problem faced by USTRANSCOM. DITOPS is an advanced prototype system developed at Carnegie Mellon University for development, analysis and revision of large-scale transportation schedules, and applied originally to the logistics domain of strategic deployment. DITOPS builds directly on concepts first demonstrated in the OPIS scheduling system and emphasizes a reactive, constraint-based approach to scheduling. It provides both specific techniques and a system architecture for efficient, localized revision of plans/schedules in response to changed constraints or decisions. Typical of most practical planning and scheduling domains, such reactive planning capabilities are recognized as central to effective MEDEVAC decision-making.
Our specific goal has been to use DITOPS to construct an evaluation
prototype for reactive planning in the medical evacuation domain, to provide
a benchmark for and a point of comparison with the Carnegie Group's
TRAC
ES reactive planner component. From a system development
perspective, DITOPS can be seen as a toolkit and a class library for
configuring different planning and scheduling application systems
[3]. We first outline the basic methodology for
application development taken in DITOPS and summarize the system's core
components for constructing domain models. In subsequent chapters
we describe the extensions and customizations developed to implement the
current medical evacuation planning prototype. The extent of the current
prototype's capabilities - which have been achieved in a very short period
of time - clearly demonstrates the potential of the approach.