Rational Communicative Behavior in Anti-Air Defense

Our research addresses rational decision-making among anti-air units whose mission is to defend a specified territory from a number of attacking missiles. In this paper, we present a decision-theoretic method that automated agents can use to select optimal communicative acts in this domain, given the characteristics of the threat situation. Since the communication bandwidth is usually limited in a battlefield environment and disclosure of any information to hostile agents should be avoided, it is critical for a defending agent to be selective as to what messages should, or should not, be sent to other friendly agents. This work builds on our earlier work that uses the Recursive Modeling Method (RMM) for coordination, and applies RMM to rational communication in the anti-air defense domain. We show how a defending automated agent can rank the values of alternative messages that could be communicated in a given defense situation. Further, we compare this ranking to communicative choices of human subjects under the same circumstances of the coordinated anti-air defense.