Intelligent Mobile Agents in the Military Domain

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories has been designing and implementing intelligent, mobile agent prototypes for various military applications since 1995. Through our experience working in the military domain, we have identified a number of agent capabilities that are common themes in many of our applications, including information push, information pull, and sentinel information monitoring. We have implemented reusable agent components to enable rapid development of agent-based applications, where information push, information pull, and sentinel information monitoring are desired behaviors. We have gained a number of valuable insights about mobile agent development, deployment, and agent capability requirements in military applications. These lessons learned can be applied to other domains that have characteristics similar to the military applications on which we have worked. These characteristics include constraints on network reliability and bandwidth; domain-dependent information processing; and complex, autonomous information processing involving large heterogeneous data resources.