Distributed Decision Support System for Networked Fire Management

The Future Combat Systems (FCS) will produce the most sophisticated war fighting system in the history of warfare. The FCS program aims to leverage advances in information technology with continuous, high-speed, digitized communications within a joint armed forces structure to achieve one of the most profound transformations ever seen in the U. S. armed services. That such transformations may lead to a revolutionary leap in the effectiveness of our forces has already been proved in recent overseas operations undertaken by our military. A prerequisite to the realization of the vision for transforming our forces is the development of software and hardware systems that not only provide intelligent support to soldiers and commanders in the battlefield to assist them in performance of mission critical tasks but also automate many of such tasks. Here, IAC addresses the need for an intelligent software infrastructure for decision support for the future digital battlefield. This system features distributed intelligent agents which analyze sensor data, war fighter input, and historical data to make optimal decisions under dynamic and uncertain conditions for network centric fire management, execution, and control, and provides an extensible and open architecture that allows rapid deployment of pluggable software components for decision support.