ORTAC plus : A User Friendly Domain Specific Language for Multi-Agent Mission Planning

A tactical military unit is a complex system composed of many agents such as infantry, robots, or drones. Given a mission, an automated planner can find an optimal plan. Therefore, the mission itself must be modeled. The problem is that languages like PDDL are too low-level to be usable by the end-user: an officer in the field. We present ORTAC+, a language and a planning tool designed for this end-user. Its main objective is to allow a natural modeling of the mission, to minimize the risk of bad modeling, and thus obtain reliable plans. The language offers high-level constructs specifically designed to describe tactical missions, but at the same time has clear semantics allowing a translation to PDDL, to take advantage of state-of-the-art planners.