Gary J Briggs

This report presents some of the challenges that the U. S. Department of Defense (DoD) may face in fielding an artificial intelligence technology called reinforcement learning (RL) in DoD applications. RL has been credited with expanding the decisionmaking ability of machines beyond that of humans in playing complex games of strategy. RL-enabled systems can beat world experts in these games; can such systems outperform humans in DoD applications?

Mission planning involves the assignment of discrete assets to prioritized targets, including the dynamic routing of those assets to their destinations under complex environmental conditions. This report presents a description of how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to conduct mission planning and how AI methods compare with more-traditional operations research approaches.