Sousa: Composing and Conducting Battle Command Services

Soar Technology is teaming with Drexel University to develop Sousa, a multi-agent system that assists warfighters by automating the task of composing Battle Command (BC) services into data flows and conducting the flow of data for initialization. Sousa decomposes the task into sub-tasks that are each handled by an intelligent software agent as part of a multi-agent system. The overall system interfaces to the other services on the network as a service itself. The system includes agents for monitoring the network infrastructure, the units and task organization of the forces, and the BC service infrastructure. A composer agent uses the BC services ontology and other information from the monitoring agents to design a composition of services that meets the quality of service (QoS) requirements and all other constraints. A conductor agent takes the design and executes the necessary commands on the network to create the data flow. It then checks the data requirements and directs the appropriate data to each service that needs to be initialized.