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Growing numbers of U.S. companies are no longer arguing about whether second-wave technology is worth adopting; instead, they are concerned about how best to use it. They are finding all sorts of ingenious applications. United Airlines has developed a simple frame-based system called GADS (Gate- Assignment and Display System) to help prevent the infuriating delays that occur when weather and scheduling problems scramble gate assignments for incoming planes. The system encodes the reasoning that gate controllers use when scheduling gate assignments (for example, two adjacent gates cannot accommodate two DC-10s at once). Before GADS, United's gate controllers would physically move magnetic pieces around on a big metal board. Now they use GADS for playing what-if games to head off problems long before they develop.
The military has tapped second-wave technology in its efforts to come to grips with the complexities of modern warfare. The Navy monitors the strategic status of the Pacific fleet with a system that tracks 600 ships, submarines and aircraft and alerts the fleet commander to changes in readiness and the probable impact of those changes. The system analyzes everything that affects readiness, from firepower and fuel consumption to morale (which it estimates by keeping track of the time that has elapsed since a ship's last shore leave). Complex fleet-deployment problems that used to require several days can now be resolved in a matter of hours.
More ambitious is ALBM (AirLand Battle Management), a system designed to address every aspect of planning and fighting an air and land battle. ALBM is intended to supply computerized intelligence to the "electronic battlefield" that the military has been developing as part of its evolving command-and- control strategy. When completed, this system will enable commanders to explore war games and battle scenarios, test tactical hypotheses and plan weapons and troop deployment. But the information-processing requirements of a major-theater war would be enormous. Managing a battle is not a case of dealing with one source of data rapidly but, rather, simultaneously processing data about air threats, supply lines, weather and the positioning of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Whether ALBM will be a device for war games or a battlefield tool depends on the military's ability to harness the power of massive parallel processors -- computers with thousands of processors that can work simultaneously on a problem.
Processing power is an even more daunting problem for Pilot's Associate, a knowledge system the military hopes to field in the 1990s. The device is designed to advise electronically a fighter pilot in combat about everything from weather to ground and air threats. It will include several expert systems with sophisticated three-dimensional data bases. But if it is to deliver its advice effectively to pilots who have only seconds to respond and act, this system too will require putting into fighter aircraft the type of computing power that today fills entire rooms.
Moreover, even the developers wonder whether pilots in a crunch will trust their lives to silicon advisers. Chris Spiegl of Texas Instruments, which is developing the system with McDonnell Douglas, notes that to better their concentration, many pilots begin turning off automatic systems the closer they get to combat.