Formalizing command intent through development of a command and control grammar

Command Intent is currently incorporated in a number of decision models. However, there is no well-established method of modeling Command Intent, as there is with Situational Awareness. Battle Management Language (BML) is being developed as an open standard that unambiguously communicates Command and Control (C2) information, including orders that express Command Intent. On the one hand, C2 communications (orders and reports) have to be unambiguous – automatically processable in order to contribute to Network-Centric exchange of information, of knowledge and of intent. On the other hand, they have to be expressive enough to convey a Commander’s goals and concept of operations. In this paper, we will argue that it is possible to develop an formal, but also highly expressive language for tasking if it is based on a formal grammar that is imbued by linguistic principles such as completeness and coherence. This also means that approaches based on the exchange of information via a data model, i.e., the Multinational Interoperability Programme’s Joint Command, Control and Consultation Information Data Exchange Model (JC3IEDM) cannot provide the expressiveness needed. To address this hypothesis we provide a grammar that formalizes Command Intent based on a well-known class of grammars, the Lexical Functional Grammar