The Agent Development Toolkit

Today, large amounts of critical information, scattered around the battlespace, cannot be located and processed fast enough for timely decision making. The result is poor situational awareness because commanders lack the facts they need. Intelligent software agents are being developed to collect, appraise, and deliver pertinent information to the right component at the right time. Yet these agents lack a common framework to interoperate in battlefield applications. The challenge is to research a common framework that permits legacy, current, and future agents to function together at the tactical battle command level, communicating across a variety of networks, to provide information to decision makers in real time. To address the problem of interoperability in the battle command environment, we will conduct research into and development of an Agent Development Toolkit. This toolkit will consist of an Agent Factory, an agent framework interface, an interface for modifying the functionality of deployed agents, and interoperability tools. This toolkit will allow non-engineers to modify agents that will interoperate with each other, other agent frameworks, and legacy systems. This will allow tactical personnel to tailor agents to react quickly to changing situations such as hostile threats, movement of coalition forces, or modified operation plans.