A Multi-Agent System Infrastructure for Large-Scale Autonomous Distributed Real-Time Intelligence Gathering Systems

Complex national security applications require support for component distribution, secure communication, fault-tolerance, and dynamic system reconfiguration that generally fall under the purview of multiagent systems (MAS). Current MAS, however, do not provide the support and flexibility for the design and long-term operation of large-scale sophisticated intelligence applications. We argue that such systems require features that result from the synergy of both MAS and SAS (single agent systems) and introduce our ADE system, showing how it supports three such synergistic features that we believe are critical to longterm, large-scale homeland security systems.