Army aviation (helicopters) represent an increasingly critical component in future airland battles and therefore a more intensive, efficient and responsive operations management system is required. Without an efficient distributed command and control system these objectives cannot be met. We propose to develop distributed automated decision aids for management and control of army helicopters operations. The methodology proposed utilizes a combination of advanced scheduling algorithm, database management, production rulebased, expert systems and interactive software systems. The resulting -c. Scheduling system is managed by several agents, corresponding to mobile nodes of the communication network, which allocate and schedule helicopter missions independently, while informing the common database of their actions and status of the resource. In the event that the helicopter resource heaches a critical state, determined by a higher level, coordinating agent, helicopter operations are centrally coordinated by a supervisory agent in collaboration with the other managing agents.
