Mobile Intelligence has experience developing and using software agent-based architectures. Two of our current projects are built around DARPA's COUGAAR software agent architecture (http://www.cougaar.org). The COUGAAR architecture is currently being used in the DARPA Ultra*Log program, with societies of several hundred agents being used to integrate the DoD logistics planning and monitoring process. Mobile Intelligence's SARA robot control system also uses a software agent, behavior-based design. Mobile Intelligence's experience with these and other systems has provided the knowledge and experience necessary to design, develop, and evaluate large-scale software agent-based systems.

Publications

• Robustness Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems

Ronald D. Snyder, Douglas C. MacKenzie, and Raymond S. Tomlinson
Proceedings Open Cougaar 2004
New York, July 2004.

When used for mission critical applications multi-agent systems must be capable of sustaining uninterrupted operations in the face of both hardware and software failures. Applications of this type are often distributed over a large number of geographically dispersed hosts, which make them susceptible to a wide range of failures. A fault tolerant infrastructure must be able to detect and adapt to these failures to provide continuity of processing. This paper discusses the approach used to provide such an infrastructure in the Cougaar multi-agent system.
 

• Cougaar Agent Communities

Ronald D. Snyder, and Douglas C. MacKenzie
Proceedings Open Cougaar 2004
New York, July 2004.

The ability to organize agents into abstract groups provides a powerful tool for agent organization and communication in large multi-agent systems. In this paper we outline the fundamental characteristics required of a robust and scalable agent grouping mechanism. These characteristics are then discussed in the context of the Cougaar community infrastructure. This implementation of agent communities illustrates the use of distributed state management, distributed event propagation and abstract messaging in a high-performance agent architecture designed for robustness and scalability.