Coordinating a distributed planning system

Distributed SIPE (DSIPE) is a distributed planning system that provides dec ision support to human planners in a collaborative planning environment. Th e key contributions of our research on DSIPE are (1) constraint-based, cons istent local views of the global plan that give each planner a view of how other planners' subplans relate to their local planning decisions; (2) meth ods for automatically identifying and sharing potentially relevant informat ion among distributed planning agents; and (3) techniques for merging subpl ans that leverage the shared subplan structure to generate a complete, fina l plan. DSIPE is a fully implemented system and has been demonstrated to en d users in the maritime (United States Navy and United States Marine Corps) planning community.