Design, Development, and Reuse of Software Agents in the Knowledge Management for Distributed Tracking (KMDT) Program

Knowledge Management for Distributed Tracking is an ongoing research and development program to improve naval command, control, and decision support. The program’s approach includes modeling and simulation, intelligent software agents, integrated-sensor ontology, and reusing methods from past projects. The software simulates a hypothetical scenario designed to demonstrate how knowledgemanagement technologies can improve situation awareness and reduce information overload. In the simulation, when additional information is desired about an unknown contact, intelligent-software agents are deployed on a secure, web-like network to find sensor data collected at other friendly platforms. The information is fused to reduce the uncertainty in the detection, localization, tracking, classification and identification of the unknown contact. The paper describes how the agents interact with the integrated sensor ontology, which facilitates distributed, heterogeneous sensor-data fusion.