An Operations Planning System Using Digital Multimedia

This paper describes the design and development of OPS, a portable, integrated training and support system for operations planning using digital multimedia technology. OPS, with its highly intuitive, graphical user interface and tools enables users to develop operations plans and orders interactively. Amongst the facilities provided are electronic map and imagery libraries and utilities which are tied into a terrain database, map overlay development and production utilities, on-line reference retrieval capabilities, and a variety of job aids. OPS enables its users to manipulate and extract graphic and other information in appropriate forms, analyse critical terrain features, resource information, etc. In its basic form, OPS is a stand alone system, with plans for a network version that would enable users to conduct planning with access to each others' overlays and operational information.