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ArtisTech has been researching
Planneal, a revolutionary planning and analysis technology for several years with the support of DARPA and ARL. After many years working on symbolic AI systems, and entity-based simulation (e.g. Distributed Interactive
Simulation and HLA Simulations) Mr. John P. Hancock (ArtisTech co-owner) invented a method for Planning in a Numeric Threat Space. The application currently undergoing testing with ARL for robot route planning, is called
Planneal. The advantage of the Planneal approach is representing battlefield conditions and elements as
fields of threat and/or opportunity to other battlefield elements; this approach enables planning problems to be solved using an arsenal of well understood numeric computing algorithms which come out of mathematics, physics,
and other physical sciences. Computation and maintenance of the constantly changing battlefield threat field is not computationally intractable as was proven by ArtisTech in 1999 under an experiment for DARPA, called Threat
Analysis Overlays. In the past 2 years ArtisTech has created the first numeric planning technology in Planneal. The Planneal algorithm is a 4-D (3D & time) simulated annealing planning approach which plans and continually
replans a route for a unit, or robot, in real-time. It is competitive with A* and derivative planning approaches, but has some unique advantages (including being inherently parallel).
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