MASCOT: Manycast Architecture for Service-Oriented Tactical Operations

In this paper we present our work on the Manycast Architecture for Service-Oriented Tactical Operations, or MASCOT, a project between the University of Masschusetts, Dartmouth and the United States Marine Corps (USMC). MASCOT is a service that can be used by the Combat Operation Centers (COCs) to efficiently allocate tactical field resources given a task request, or mission, and set of constraints. We have implemented a prototype as a standalone Java application that is able to allocate resources for tactical missions. COCs deal with a large amount of dynamic input from other systems and must manage a number of tactical field resources. Finding good resources given a specific request involves examining a large solution space which is difficult for human operators. MASCOT can make this task faster and more accurate.