Coalition Agents Experiment: Multi-Agent Co-operation in an International Coalition Setting

Military Coalitions are examples of large-scale multi-faceted virtual organizations, which sometimes need to be rapidly created and flexibly changed as circumstances alter. The Coalition Agents eXperiment (CoAX) aims to show that multi-agent systems are an effective way of dealing with the complexity of real-world problems, such as agile and robust Coalition operations and enabling interoperability between heterogeneous components including legacy and actual military systems. CoAX is an international collaboration carried out under the auspices of DARPA's Control of Agent-Based Systems (CoABS) program. Building on the CoABS Grid framework, the CoAX agent infrastructure groups agents into domains that reflect real-world organizational, functional and national boundaries, such that security and access to agents and information can be governed by policies at multiple levels. A series of staged demonstrations of increased complexity are being conducted in a realistic peace-enforcement scenario situated in 2012 in the fictitious African state of "Binni". These demonstrations show how agent technologies support the rapid, co-ordinated construction of a Coalition command system for intelligence gathering, for visualization, and for campaign, battle and mission planning and execution.