A Demonstration of a Simulation Tool for Planning Robust Military Village Searches

In the current military environment, village searches are conducted daily by a variety of search team types. Staff officers planning these resource allocation problems currently rely on experience and simple data tables to develop the plans. The Robust People, Animals, and Robots Search (RoPARS) planning tool for village searches developed at Colorado State University can assist military planners with this tedious process. The tool consists of a graphical user interface and a resource allocation engine. Its output is a mission plan that is robust against uncertainty in the battlefield environment (e.g., unit speed, temperature, enemy contact). The contributions of this paper include the RoPARS tool and its robustness concepts, mathematical models, and resource allocation heuristics.