The Military Aircraft Allocation Planner (MAAP) resulted from a multi-year research project supported by the Air Force and Prometheus internal funds. While MAAP is configured to handle the specific problem for which it is named, it has a number of generic features which give it wide applicability in decision problems. It is comprised of five basic parts:
1. The Extended Dependency Model (EDM) - which assigns weights to different
assets and objectives in a hierarchical way, thereby allowing a quantitative
assessment of the relative value of all assets and objectives [reference J. S.
Byrnes and R. Angell, "The Dependency Model: a Tool for Analytically
Calculating System Effectiveness", IEEE Transactions on Reliability Theory,
34, 17-24, 1985]
2. The Measure of Effectiveness (MOE) - this formula uses the weights assigned
by EDM, pairwise effectiveness and potential costs of each asset with every
target, and joint effectivenesses of multiple assets to arrive at a means of
computing an overall value for every possible strategy;
3. The optimization engine - a genetic algorithm method is used to find
optimal or near-optimal strategies;
4. The transcription map - the structure of the coding of genes into
strategies is crucial to the elimination of redundancies;
5. The GUI-designed to facilitate data entry and hierarchy construction.
A potential application of the basic MAAP tool to ASW search planning,
comprising objectives, available resources and constraints, is illustrated in
the figure attached to this link.
