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4th October 2002

CCL's latest agent could help armed forces

As part of an ongoing £3m QinetiQ project, CCL has been awarded £250,000 to develop an agent based decision support demonstrator that will be used to determine whether Royal Navy Airborne Early Warning aircrew could be supported by an electronic system to help them prioritise potential threats to the fleet.

The role of Airborne Early Warning aircrew is to detect and rapidly prioritise any incoming threats, a role normally conducted aboard a Naval helicopter stationed well in front of the fleet. Whilst existing systems are proven to work well, today's early warning aircrew are faced with ever increasing complexity and amounts of data upon which they must base their threat assessment.

Intelligent software agents provide for a robust and co-operative distributed system that will support aircrew in making effective decisions. It uses the information obtained from disparate sensor, data and intelligence sources and derived from aircrew expertise in the form of a knowledge base which also incorporates appropriate tactical doctrine.

As well as supporting the aircrew decision making process, electronic agent systems are expected to provide additional functionality by being able to consider outside sources of information - such as the regular timetables for commercial traffic - and factor this into the threat decision making process. CCL's demonstrator will allow QinetiQ to assess the expected increase in operational effectiveness of the early warning system when aircrew are supported by intelligent decision aids.

CCL won the project because of its experience of agent technology and advanced software design, coupled with several decades of experience of working within MoD guidelines.

Rob Zanconato of CCL, who is responsible for running the project, explained: "Agent technology is ideally suited to this type of role, given its ability to deal with large quantities of complex, real-time data arriving from a large number of concurring sources. Also, agent technology is extremely robust. By distributing processing across different systems, the potential loss of one system has little effect on overall functionality, something that could be highly useful in a combat scenario. Moreover, agents are capable of interpreting real life scenarios where you are given inconsistent or conflicting data, for example, where one radar spots a perceived threat whilst another radar does not. It is a combination of these characteristics that make agents a potentially excellent software aid for the aircrew."

While CCL expects to complete this project within a year, its agent-based knowledge can be applied to create intelligent support tools across a range of other commercial and military environments. Previous projects undertaken by CCL using agent-based software have included tools for the automated purchase of telecommunications bandwidth and a system to support research scientists in the pharmaceutical industry.

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