IMMACCS: A Multi-Agent Decision-Support System

This report describes work performed by the Collaborative Agent Design Research Center for the US Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL), on the IMMACCS experimental decision-support system. IMMACCS (Integrated Marine Multi-Agent Command and Control System) incorporates three fundamental concepts that distinguish it from existing (i.e., legacy) command and control applications. First, it is a collaborative system in which computer-based agents assist human operators by monitoring, analyzing, and reasoning about events in near real-time. Second, IMMACCS includes an ontological model of the battlespace that represents the behavioral characteristics and relationships among real world entities such as friendly and enemy assets, infrastructure objects (e.g., buildings, roads, and rivers), and abstract notions. This object model provides the essential common language that binds all IMMACCS components into an integrated and adaptive decision-support system. Third, IMMACCS provides no ready made solutions that may not be applicable to the problems that will occur in the real world. Instead, the agents represent a powerful set of tools that together with the human operators can adjust themselves to the problem situations that cannot be predicted in advance. In this respect, IMMACCS is an adaptive command and control system that supports planning, execution and training functions concurrently. The report describes the nature and functional requirements of military command and control, the architectural features of IMMACCS that are designed to support these operational requirements, the capabilities of the tools (i.e., agents) that IMMACCS offers its users, and the manner in which these tools can be applied. Finally, the performance of IMMACCS during the Urban Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment held in California in March, 1999, is discussed from an operational viewpoint

The ICDM Development Toolkit: Technical Description

This report provides a technical description of the Integrated Cooperative Decision-Making (ICDM) software toolkit for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. An overview of the transformational forces that have precipitated the need for a development toolkit capable of supporting a distributed, information-centric software environment, and the objectives of ICDM are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-16-04) entitled: “The ICDM Development Toolkit: Purpose and Overview”. ICDM is an application development framework and toolkit for distributed decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any ICDM-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the ICDM Toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, distributed, information-centric system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically “push” changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion and editing of objects; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades. Most importantly, the ICDM Toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with tools that automatically build an application engine by integrating Toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, an ICDM-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field. An ICDM-based software development process offers at least four distinct advantages over current data-centric software development practices. First, it provides a convenient structured transition to information-centric software applications and systems in which computer-based agents with reasoning capabilities assist human users to accelerate the tempo and increase the accuracy of decision-making activities. Second, ICDM allows software developers to automatically generate a significant portion of the code, leaving essentially only the domain-specific user-interface functions and individual agents to be designed and coded manually. Third, ICDM disciplines the software development process by shifting the focus from implementation to design, and by structuring the process into clearly defined stages. Each of these stages produces a set of verifiable artifacts, including a well defined and comprehensive documentation trail. Finally, ICDM provides a development platform for achieving interoperability by formalizing a common language and compatible representation across multiple applications within a distributed environment

The TIRAC™ Development Toolkit: Technical Description

This report provides a technical description of the Toolkit for Information Representation and Agent Collaboration (TIRAC™) software framework for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. An overview of the transformational forces that have precipitated the need for a development toolkit capable of supporting a distributed, information-centric software environment, and the objectives of TIRAC™ are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-17-04) entitled: “The TIRAC™ Development Toolkit: Purpose and Overview.” TIRAC™ is an application development framework and toolkit for distributed decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate, and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any TIRAC-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the TIRAC™ Toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, distributed, information-centric system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically “push” changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion, and editing of objects; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades. Most importantly, the TIRAC™ Toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with tools that automatically build an application engine by integrating Toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, a TIRAC-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field. A TIRAC-based software development process offers at least four distinct advantages over current data-centric software development practices. First, it provides a convenient structured transition to information-centric software applications and systems in which computer-based agents with reasoning capabilities assist human users to accelerate the tempo and increase the accuracy of decision-making activities. Second, TIRAC™ allows software developers to automatically generate a significant portion of the code, leaving essentially only the domain-specific user-interface functions and individual agents to be designed and coded manually. Third, TIRAC™ disciplines the software development process by shifting the focus from implementation to design, and by structuring the process into clearly defined stages. Each of these stages produces a set of verifiable artifacts, including a well defined and comprehensive documentation trail. Finally, TIRAC™ provides a development platform for achieving interoperability by formalizing a common language and compatible representation across multiple applications within a distributed environment

The ICDM Development Toolkit: Purpose and Overview

This report provides an overview description of the Integrated Cooperative Decision-Making (ICDM) software toolkit for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. More technical descriptions of ICDM are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-18-04) entitled: ‘The ICDM Development Toolkit: Technical Description’. ICDM is an application development framework and toolkit for decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any ICDM-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the ICDM Toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, information-centric system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically ‘push’ changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to assign priorities to their subscription profiles; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion and editing of objects; support for the management of internal communication transmissions through load balancing, self-diagnosis, self-association and self-healing capabilities; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades. Most importantly, the ICDM Toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with scripts that automatically build an application engine by integrating Toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, an ICDM-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field. Particular ICDM design notions and features that have been incorporated in response to the increasing need for achieving interoperability among heterogeneous systems include: support for overarching ontologies in combination with more specialized, domain-specific, lower level facades; compliance with Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Common Operating Environment (COE) segmentation principles, and their recent transition to the more challenging information-centric objectives of the Global Information Grid (GIG) Enterprise Services (GES) environment; seamless transition from one functional domain to another; operational integration to allow planning, rehearsal, execution, gaming, and modeling functions to be supported within the same application; and, system diagnosis with the objective of ensuring graceful degradation through self-monitoring, self-diagnosis, and failure alert capabilities. An ICDM-based software development process offers at least four distinct advantages over current data-centric software development practices. First, it provides a convenient structured transition to information-centric software applications and systems in which computer-based agents with reasoning capabilities assist human users to accelerate the tempo and increase the accuracy of decision-making activities. Second, ICDM allows software developers to automatically generate a significant portion of the code, leaving essentially only the domain-specific user-interface functions and individual agents to be designed and coded manually. Third, ICDM disciplines the software development process by shifting the focus from implementation to design, and by structuring the process into clearly defined stages. Each of these stages produces a set of verifiable artifacts, including a well defined and comprehensive documentation trail. Finally, ICDM provides a development platform for achieving interoperability by formalizing a common language and compatible representation across multiple applications

The TIRAC™ Development Toolkit: Purpose and Overview

This report provides an overview description of the Toolkit for Information Representation and Agent Collaboration (TIRAC™) software framework for the development of intelligent decision-support applications. More technical descriptions of TIRAC™ are contained in a companion CDM Technical Report (CDM-19-03) entitled: ‘The TIRAC™ Development Toolkit: Technical Description’. TIRAC™ is an application development framework and toolkit for decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any TIRAC-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the TIRAC™ toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, information-centric, distributed system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically ‘push’ changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to assign priorities to their subscription profiles; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion and editing of objects; support for the management of internal communication transmissions through load balancing, self-diagnosis, self-association and self-healing capabilities; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades. Most importantly, the TIRAC™ toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with scripts that automatically build an application engine by integrating toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, an TIRAC-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field. Particular TIRAC™ design notions and features that have been incorporated in response to the increasing need for achieving interoperability among heterogeneous systems include: support for overarching ontologies in combination with more specialized, domain-specific, lower level facades; compliance with Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Common Operating Environment (COE) segmentation principles, and their recent transition to the more challenging information-centric objectives of the Global Information Grid (GIG) Enterprise Services (GES) environment; seamless transition from one functional domain to another; operational integration to allow planning, rehearsal, execution, gaming, and modeling functions to be supported within the same application; and, system diagnosis with the objective of ensuring graceful degradation through self-monitoring, self-diagnosis, and failure alert capabilities. An TIRAC-based software development process offers at least four distinct advantages over current data-centric software development practices. First, it provides a convenient structured transition to information-centric software applications and systems in which computer-based agents with reasoning capabilities assist human users to accelerate the tempo and increase the accuracy of decision-making activities. Second, TIRAC™ allows software developers to automatically generate a significant portion of the code, leaving essentially only the domain-specific user-interface functions and individual agents to be designed and coded manually. Third, TIRAC™ disciplines the software development process by shifting the focus from implementation to design, and by structuring the process into clearly defined stages. Each of these stages produces a set of verifiable artifacts, including a well defined and comprehensive documentation trail. Finally, TIRAC™ provides a development platform for achieving interoperability by formalizing a common language and compatible representation across multiple applications

TRANSWAY®: Planning with the Tabu Search Algorithm

Military deployment and distribution responsibilities call for intelligent collaborative tools in support of strategic and operational planning functions involving the sustainment and movement of military forces. The sustainment requirement is generated at the operational level and is dynamic. It is composed of shifting priorities responding to changes in commander’s intent and changes in the operational situation. The TRANSWAY software application is designed as a set of intelligent collaborative tools supporting operators performing planning and re-planning tasks in a dynamically changing decision-making environment. TRANSWAY includes several agents with strategic and operational planning and re-planning capabilities. The principal agent is based on the Tabu Search algorithm, with the intent of finding an optimum plan for the delivery of supplies from multiple origins, through multiple routes, with different kinds of conveyances, to multiple destinations, within specified time and resource constraints

TRANSWAY® (Integrated Computerized Deployment System) Technical and Operational Description

The TRANSWAY® software application is an adaptive, ontology-based toolset with collaborative agents, designed to assist the Deployment and Distribution Operations Center (DDOC) staff of the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) with the performance of movement planning tasks. The principal focus of the TRANSWAY® toolset is re-planning. The objective of TRANSWAY® is to provide DDOC operators with an intelligent planning engine that receives data from GTN and JOPES, and utilizes the existing Integrated Computerized Deployment System (ICODES) and Joint Forces Collaborative Toolkit (JFCT®; -formerly known as SEAWAY) agent-based applications as functional extensions. With its initial and immediate focus on the DDOC and the JDDOCs in the theater, the TRANSWAY® toolset is designed as a component of a larger adaptive decision-support environment that is expected to evolve over the next several years. The broader focus of this umbrella decision-support environment is to support the Combatant Commands and USTRANSCOM in logistic planning and execution at the strategic and operational levels. In particular, this decision-support environment must provide the necessary connections between changing requirements and changes in the strategic flow of supplies and equipment to the Joint Operating Area. Joint operations are currently conducted in a framework that lacks key linkages between the joint force sustainment requirement and the supply and transport processes that must satisfy this requirement. Both the TRANSWAY® toolset and the more gradually evolving umbrella decision-support environment, of which it forms a component part, exemplify the planned transition of the existing USTRANSCOM Corporate Data Environment (CDE) to an intelligent Corporate Information-Centric Environment (CICE) with knowledge management capabilities. Compliant with the principles defined by the Department of Defense Net-Centric Data Strategy (Stenbit 2003), the proposed CICE architecture is designed to support the incremental implementation of progressively more intelligent and powerful tools operating within an adaptive collaborative decision-support environment that alerts its users to unforeseen events, assesses risks, identifies opportunities, generates alternatives, maintains in-transit visibility, facilitates time-critical re-planning, and collects lessons learned. TRANSWAY® has been designed and implemented according to the principles of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and incorporates an integrated set of functional capabilities in the form of intelligent web-based thin-client and distributed thick-client tools. These tools, referred to as Knowledge Management Enterprise Services (KMES®), are self-contained software modules with powerful functional capabilities and clearly defined interface specifications. They are designed to be platform independent and may be configured to any particular execution environment. However, most importantly they are reusable as components of any system that has a need for their capabilities. Some of these services may have quite narrow capabilities such as the mapping of data imported from an external source to an internal information model or ontology, while others will incorporate larger functional domains such as the optimum routing of goods from multiple origins along alternative routes to multiple destinations. The KMES® approach to software systems incorporates intelligent agent technology to analyze and categorize incoming signals and data, and then issue warnings and alerts as appropriate. The agents manipulate the incoming data within an internal information-centric representation framework (i.e., ontology) to publish statements of implication, and if so empowered, proceed to develop plans for appropriate action. Legacy data-centric systems can become clients of such an agent-based KMES® software environment through the use of interoperability bridges that map the data model in one system to the information model of the other and allow a two-way data exchange. The notion of service-oriented is represented as much in the elements of the three distinct tiers (i.e., information, logic, and presentation) of the TRANSWAY® architecture, as it is in the functional capabilities of each KMES® component. Therefore, even the internal elements of a KMES® component communicate through standard interfaces as they provide services to each other. They are, in essence, decoupled software modules that can be replaced with improved modules as the technology advances. Each of these modules functions in an integrated fashion to form a comprehensive agent-based decision-support execution framework. In summary, KMES® modules are intelligent, self-contained software components that are capable of performing narrowly defined tasks within a net-centric system environment. They are distinguished from legacy software systems in five ways. First, they adhere to clearly defined application programming interface (API) specifications, but are otherwise decoupled from the service requesters that they interface with. Second, they are reusable and can be interfaced with systems that require the kinds of services that they provide. Third, they are able to provide their services to both human users and other software systems. Fourth, their capabilities are enabled when they are configured (i.e., initialized) with the terminology and notions of the target domain. Fifth, they are self-contained and can be replaced by improved modules as the technology advances. Like all KMES® components that CDM Technologies has developed over the past 12 years, the TRANSWAY® suite of planning and decision-support tools have been designed and implemented within the Integrated Cooperative Decision Making (ICDM) software environment1. ICDM is an application development framework for distributed decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any ICDM-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents. Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the ICDM Development Toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, distributed, information-centric system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically push changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to assign priorities to their subscription profiles; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion and editing of objects; support for the management of internal communication transmissions through load balancing, self-diagnosis, self-association and self-healing capabilities; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through interoperability bridges and ontological facades. An Iterative Spiral Development Strategy has been adopted for the TRANSWAY® project. This software engineering approach fosters user participation throughout the design process, by bringing pre-release versions of the evolving application to potential users at relatively short time intervals throughout the development period. In this way users are encouraged to provide feedback on existing capabilities and recommendations for additional capabilities. The new demands on joint and coalition operations, which have precipitated a re-examination of deployment and distribution objectives and performance expectations, are likely to change significant aspects of joint theater distribution. Under these circumstances only an iterative development strategy will allow TRANSWAY® development to stay aligned with the corresponding changes in functionality requirements