Integrating agents into data-centric naval combat management systems

The number of systems and software developed by using agent oriented technologies has increased dramatically within the last decade. In parallel with this increase, lots of agent based tools, techniques, methods and platforms have been proposed. Some of the agent platforms were designed for generic purposes, while the others were tailored for specific needs. Although there are many existing platforms, we still need novel agent platforms supporting the new promising application domains. Naval combat management systems is one of these domains due to its complex and dynamic nature. In the Information Age, intelligent systems become an inevitable necessity for combat management systems while the network-centric warfare supersedes the conventional platform-centric concepts. In this paper, we will discuss how agent technology can be integrated with data-centric naval combat management systems. The proposed solutions are based on the Data Distribution Service (DDS) infrastructure. DDS is an Object Management Group (OMG) middleware standard using the publish-subscribe paradigm and quality of service parameters for data-centric asynchronous communication.