Defense Industry Applications of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing)

In all modern military doctrines the mission effectiveness shall be dramatically increased by the robust networking of all forces, sharing of information and distributed intelligent information processing, generating situational awareness and providing decision support. In addition, these principles also offer an effective way to improve security systems that support the fight against terrorists and organized crime. Intelligent Agents are a key technology to realize such modern defence and security systems and are therefore increasingly investigated by researchers and practioners in that field. This book is a collection of recent published and refereed papers drawn from workshops and other colloquia held in various venues around the world in the last two years. Papers in this book describe work in the development of command and control systems, military communications systems, information systems, surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, simulators and HCI. The broad nature of the application domain is matched by the diversity of techniques used in the papers that are included in the collection. The collection provides, for the first time, an overview of the most significant work being performed by the leading workers in this area. It provides a single reference point for the state of the art in the field at the moment and will be of interest to Computer Science professionals working in the defence sector, and academics and students investigating the technology of Intelligent Agents that are curious to see how the technology is applied in practice. The book also provides valuable decision support for planners and strategists in defence- and security-related companies, organizations, ministries and departments.