COMPAS: Collection Management Planning using Agent Surrogates

ISR collection management planning requires data from a variety of sources spread across a large disconnected, intermittent, and latency challenged networks. As a result, collection management planning relies heavily on the cognitive abilities of the Collection Manager to decide on the best coverage and application of ISR sensor platforms.Intelligent software agent technologies have the ability to help optimize the collection management plan by reaching across some of the boundaries created by the challenging network environment and combining the intermediate results of distributed agents. The COMPAS program was created to test the core concepts of establishing such a software agency. COMPAS software agents will communicate and reason according to a collection management planning ontology, and each specific type of sensor agent will be tuned to the specific parameters and capability set of their respective platform.The collection-plan broker (CPB) will establish a set of collection requirements that will be published to the agency. The agents will assess the set and provide useful metrics related to the requirements they are capable of meeting and the overall costs associated with meeting those requests. With the information provided by each agent, the CBP will identify the best ISR allocation plan.