Collaborative Agents for C2 Teamwork Simulation

Existing team training software often requires that trainees be organized as physical teams and the members of the same team be trained at the same time. To demonstrate that team training software can be made more flexible, this paper presents an approach to incorporating software agents into the distributed command-and-control (C2) simulation software DDD, which supports only human players. Based on the multi-agent architecture CAST, the software agents are designed as a team to perform C2 tasks in the DDD. By associating the agents with the same basic capabilities as the DDD provides its human users, we illustrate how to specify the teamwork knowledge for the agent team, and how to make agents efficiently reason about the dynamic, partially observable environment. Different methods of communication and coordination among agents are also briefly described.