Patent ID: 8078319

Claim:
A non-transitory computer readable medium containing executable instructions for controlling a team of vehicles, with each vehicle having an associated set of capabilities, said computer executable instructions comprising: a plan dependency identifier configured to analyze a mission plan and identify mission constraints of the mission plan; a contingency manager configured to continuously review execution of the mission plan for violations of the mission constraints, the contingency manager being configured to map tasks of the mission plan into an hierarchy such that a given task in a first layer of the hierarchy of tasks can have at least one component task in a second layer of the hierarchy; an alert formulator configured to determine whether a part of the mission plan is threatened by a loss of a first vehicle of the team of vehicles; and a mission planner configured to receive alerts from said alert formulator and modify only parts of the mission plan necessitated by the alerts, such that the mission planner generates a new mission plan comprising modified tasks and unmodified tasks.