From Optimal to Robust COAs: Challenges in Providing Integrated Decision Support for Simulation-Based COA Planning

Abstract. With the increasing availability computer-based simulations, military Courses of Action (COA) planning can go beyond the doctrinally required three distinct COAs to accomplish the mission. In principle, planners can generate, simulate, compare and select from a large number of COAs, thus vastly increasing the chances for finding good COAs. However, any planning based on simulations has to face an intrinsic problem of simulation models, namely, that there is an inevitable gap between the models and reality. Comparing and selecting COAs on the basis of simulation results can be problematic in the face of simulation model gaps and errors. The gap between model and reality is not an issue for computer simulations alone; as Secretary Rumsfeld’s now-famous remark about “unknown unknowns ” suggests, simulations that human minds perform are also subject to the same problem. However, humans have evolved a set of heuristics by which they sometimes critique their models and simulations to test their robustness. The awareness of this gap is not common in research on decision support for planning involving computer simulation. In addition, since much of the simulation takes place rapidly in the computer, the planner is not even aware of possible gaps, and there is