In terms of human engineering, the IES must justify its advice and the SES approach of displaying a trace of rules is inadequate because the users of IES systems may be novices, the problem perspective in the IES reasoning process will oftem be different from human expert users, and the time available to justify device is very limited for IES systems. A major aspect of C 2 decision making is the scheduling and management of resources. From the AI perspective, this is a problem in automated planning . Planners generate procedural networks which define actions to be performed, order dependencies, and, if hierarchical planning is employed, the reasons for those actions. Systems apply a knowledge base of goals and actions defining the conditions under which goals and actions are feasable and the constraints that need to be checked to test their feasibility to generate a plan.
Planning is a problem in forming procedural networks that satisfy all posted constraints.
One of the domains SIPE has been used for is planning the operations of the launch of aircraft from a carrier. Interactive plan generation with SIPE is a process of careful network construction. Nodes can be added to the procedural network by the user, in which case SIPE checks for consistency, or SIPE can automatically add nodes under the user's guidance. Only nodes that correspond to one of the legal operations in the SIPE knowledge base can be used. It incorporates action planning techniques, production rule and frame based formalisms, and natural language processing.