Cockpit emergency response: the problem of reactive plan projection

When equipment failure occurs, a smart control interface must carry out what amounts to a reactive plan to advise the operator how to deal with the problem. The authors describe a reactive advisory system with a lookahead capability to display the most probable future sequence of actions. The user sees the actions to be taken as a simple list. A checklist is displayed graphically as a vertical stack of uniform-sized boxes. Anticipated future items are distinguished from active items. When the system revises the list of anticipated items, some boxes stay, some get discarded, and some are newly created. The algorithm for handling these revisions is called the look-ahead manager (LAM). Its operation is quite simple, given the overall architecture of the plan interpreter. The execution architecture is described. The interaction of LAM with this architecture is outlined. The operation is illustrated with examples from the domain of fighter aircraft