Extracting Tactical Data from Operation Orders
Abstract
The User-Assisted Translation of Operational Plans (UATOP) project and Anticipating Combat Ammunition Consumption (ACAC) project are building tools to assist Division Ammunition Officers (DAOs) in anticipating ammunition consumption before battle. This capability is a vital component of logistics operations in the Army's emerging AirLand Operations doctrine. Operating with future Army information systems, the program will examine operation orders (OPORDs) and simulate the battle and potential courses of action to estimate consumption quantity and location of high-cost, high-weight munitions. Significantly improving the DAO's capability will increase combat unit effectiveness by minimizing the amount of extra ammunition that must be carried by a unit if oversupplied, thus freeing up vehicles and enabling more rapid deployment. Likewise, the system will pinpoint potential undersupply problems before the battle. A key to the ACAC simulation technology is the ability for the simulation to "understand" the contents of OPORDs. This includes establishing task force organization and locating and translating the tasks to perform. Because OPORDs contain English directives written for people and not machines, current machine-translation techniques are not directly suitable for extracting OPORD data. RAND has developed a new machine-translation approach that takes advantage of the prescribed 5-paragraph format of OPORDs to identify and isolate pertinent pieces of information. This approach uses concise and clear rules to antomatically generate programs that take as input textual OPORDs, such as those transmitted through the Maneuver Control System (MCS), extracts the desired data, and outputs this data as input to other computer systems. This report describes the structure and operation of the OPORG translation system. (9 figures, 12 refs.)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA428187
Entities
People
- James R. Kipps
- Jed B. Marti
Organizations
- RAND Corporation