Net-Centric Operations Technologies

By taking a computer-centered approach to warfighting, military personnel can share time-critical and subject-critical information faster and more accurately than ever before.

Objectives

We are identifying, developing, and field testing technologies to provide information and decision superiority for agile operational forces. Our key objectives are to develop technologies that allow fast, accurate, network-centric collection and sharing of time-critical and subject-critical information and plans between subordinates, superiors, and peers. Our network-centric technologies will scale from small autonomously operating squads to divisions and larger.

Key Technologies

We are advancing network connectivity and reliability, shared situation understanding, and decision synchronization, concentrating our research and development efforts for network-centric operations in three key areas of decision synchronization:

• Dynamic composition of custom systems-of-systems across services and coalitions by applying agency-oriented development in service oriented architectures, syntactic and semantic interoperability, tools for dynamic service configuration, and dynamic workflow composition.
• Collaborative decision-making support that provides smart information sharing for battle-rhythm pacing, and synergistic goal coordination and custom alerting.
• Management of actionable, relevant information based on proactive information delivery; information correlation; task delegation to autonomous, intelligent agents; and adaptive assistants.

To support development of decision synchronization, we are developing or leveraging:

• Intelligent agents, including workflow agents, adaptive agents, agent learning, agent-system security, and task-delegation Wizards.
• Mobile, network-aware agents, including network monitoring and results information management in mobile ad hoc networks.
• Cognitive-agent capabilities, including cognitive architectures, adaptive architectures, genetic programming, workflow planning, and workflow learning.
• Decision coordination capabilities, including motivation-based control and coordination for teams.

Applications and Transition Opportunities

Our technologies are being integrated into or are ready for transition to:

• Fast Connectivity for Coalitions and Agents ProjectÑthe follow-on program to the Intelligent Interoperable Agent Toolkit program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
• The Warrior's Edge network-centric integration for the Army Research Laboratory, part of Office of the Secretary of Defense's portfolio.
• The Knowledge Management Team for the Office of Naval Research.
• Time-Critical Targeting Dynamic Decision Enabler for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics and Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Solutions.
• Pioneer, Silent Hammer, and Enterprise Strike Warfare Architecture for Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems and Solutions.

Net-Centric Operations Technologies is one of several Business Areas for the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory