ARPI adopts a mixed-initiative approach to develop an Air Campaign Plan. Thus, humans will be necessarily involved in the process, either constructing or modifying the plan. However, air campaign planning usually occurs under severe pressure and time restrictions. Several alternative plans are constructed before and during a campaign. The development of the campaign requires constant modification of existing plans. Further, an air campaign plan is normally developed by teams working separately in parts or sections of the overall plan. All these factors lead to the introduction of errors or inconsistencies in the air campaign plan. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully evaluate and check these plans.
However, evaluating air campaign plans is a difficult task. A realistic air campaign plan comprises hundreds of objectives structured hierarchically, and thousands of targets. It is thus very difficult to verify if all these objectives are correct and coherent. Further, it is also difficult to abstract `aggregate' information, that takes into account the plan as a whole. As a result, it is almost impossible to evaluate and compare plans manually in an efficient way.
These factors make clear the need for systems that are able to check the consistency and correctness of air campaign plans, as well as to evaluate them over several dimensions. INSPECT is designed to address these needs by providing an automated and easily modifiable ACPlan consistency-checker and evaluator.