Cooperative intelligent agents for mission support

This paper investigates the use of an agent-based framework for knowledge sharing and interoperability between autonomous subsystems for mission software. The two main goals of this work are the integration of applications into a common framework, and mission independent generalization of applications. The rationale for having multiple interacting agents is that a society of agents would provide added value by cooperation. One of the main benefits is enabling the applications to share information and knowledge and coordinate the decision-making process at run time, in an autonomous manner in the domain of space operations and control. Previous autonomy developments have resulted in efficient and robust inference engines, oriented mostly towards planning and scheduling activities, with little concern for a more general framework of an integrated mission operation system. We attempt to incorporate previous expertise in a more general way, by extending it to a set of heterogeneous applications. The applications will adhere to the common shared background will be generic, mission independent, and re-usable. The system architecture has been based on interacting agents. The applications are considered as knowledge based agents sharing their knowledge. Agents communicate their intentions, goals and they also commit to achieve tasks on behalf of other agents. An agent is more than anything an entity that has goals to fulfil and resources to manage. These goals can be induced by its needs or derived from contracts that the agent commits to achieve. The agents are assigned with goals and they cooperate to achieve these goals. Goals can be specified beyond the level of an isolated agent. Experiments have been realized using a given agent infrastructure, with a representative scenario, requiring the cooperation of different agents; initial results are presented