The DARPA JFACC program: modeling and control of military operations

The goals, scope, and structure of the DARPA JFACC program is described, with emphasis on the flexibility given to investigators in problem definition and research objectives, and the wide variety of approaches that have been proposed. Five major areas of research are briefly summarized: active adversary and game theoretic techniques; stochastic optimization; model predictive control; finite state machines and discrete event systems; and emergent behavior. The major concepts of operation under consideration for application of this research are described: fully autonomous operation; state estimation and prediction; tracking and adaptive control; and online sensitivity analysis. Significant conclusions arising out of the current research and future directions are presented.