Agent-Based Situational Reasoning for in-Theater Distribution

The US military has taken a great interest in the concepts of sense & respond. Last year, the army logistics innovation agency (LIA) developed a recommendation for an army sense and respond logistics (S & RL) vision and demonstrated some key capabilities of S & RL by incorporating intelligent agent reasoning technology with a set of disparate data sources to more efficiently and effectively manage logistics information. S & RL relies on the power of the network to support the warfighter at the point of effect with a set of streamlined, adaptive, end-to-end planning and execution capabilities. This paper presents one of the key innovations of the prototype that was developed, an agent-based network construct for building and maintaining near real-time situational awareness among many different organizations. What was unique about this approach is that it harnessed a number of emerging technologies: intelligent agents, semantic Web and grid computing in an interesting way to successfully achieve the objectives of dynamic theater sourcing, distribution planning and routing in an S & RL environment