People responding to high-consequence national-security situations need tools to help them make the right decision quickly. The dynamic, time-critical, and ever-changing nature of these situations, especially those involving an adversary, require models of decision support that can dynamically react as a situation unfolds and changes. Automated knowledge capture is a key part of creating individualized models of decision making in many situations because it has been demonstrated as a very robust way to populate computational models of cognition. However, existing automated knowledge capture techniques only populate a knowledge model with data prior to its use, after which the knowledge model is static and unchanging. In contrast, humans, including our national-security adversaries, continually learn, adapt, and create new knowledge as they make decisions and witness their effect. This artificial dichotomy between creation and use exists because the majority of automated knowledge capture techniques are based on traditional batch machine-learning and statistical algorithms. These algorithms are primarily designed to optimize the accuracy of their predictions and only secondarily, if at all, concerned with issues such as speed, memory use, or ability to be incrementally updated. Thus, when new data arrives, batch algorithms used for automated knowledge capture currently require significant recomputation, frequently from scratch, which makes them ill suited for use in dynamic, timecritical, high-consequence decision making environments. In this work we seek to explore and expand upon the capabilities of dynamic, incremental models that can adapt to an ever-changing feature space.
The goal of Phase 3 the OSD ATL Contingency Contractor Optimization (CCO) project is to create an engineering prototype of a tool for the contingency contractor element of total force planning during the Support for Strategic Analysis (SSA). An optimization model was developed to determine the optimal mix of military, Department of Defense (DoD) civilians, and contractors that accomplishes a set of user defined mission requirements at the lowest possible cost while honoring resource limitations and manpower use rules. An additional feature allows the model to understand the variability of the Total Force Mix when there is uncertainty in mission requirements.
When developing linear programming models, issues such as budget limitations, customer requirements, or licensing may preclude the use of commercial linear programming solvers. In such cases, one option is to use an open-source linear programming solver. A survey of linear programming tools was conducted to identify potential open-source solvers. From this survey, four open-source solvers were tested using a collection of linear programming test problems and the results were compared to IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimizer (CPLEX) [1], an industry standard. The solvers considered were: COIN-OR Linear Programming (CLP) [2], [3], GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK) [4], lp_solve [5] and Modular In-core Nonlinear Optimization System (MINOS) [6]. As no open-source solver outperforms CPLEX, this study demonstrates the power of commercial linear programming software. CLP was found to be the top performing open-source solver considered in terms of capability and speed. GLPK also performed well but cannot match the speed of CLP or CPLEX. lp_solve and MINOS were considerably slower and encountered issues when solving several test problems.
The goal of Phase 3 the OSD ATL Contingency Contractor Optimization (CCO) project is to create an engineering prototype of a tool for the contingency contractor element of total force planning during the Support for Strategic Analysis (SSA). An optimization model was developed to determine the optimal mix of military, Department of Defense (DoD) civilians, and contractors that accomplishes a set of user defined mission requirements at the lowest possible cost while honoring resource limitations and manpower use rules. An additional feature allows the model to understand the variability of the Total Force Mix when there is uncertainty in mission requirements.