Autonomous Agents with Application to the Evaluation of Organizational Structures

Abstract

Experimental investigation of adaptive command and control (C2) organizations is limited in scope by the availability of qualified subjects and the complexity of experimental design and analysis for large organizational structures. These limitations challenge the study of adaptive architectures for command and control (A2C2) to represent a realistic command and control environment with a small number of human participants. This paper presents a method of representing large organizations by introducing autonomous agents that simulate additional decision-makers. These agents not only interact with the human participants via message communication, but they also interact with the environment, which indirectly affects the human participants and contributes to a more realistic environment. Since the agents act as additional uncontrolled factors and increase the variability of the experiment, it is important to control their actions such that the variability is minimized (or at least controlled). In this paper, the controllability issue is addressed by scripting agents' actions. The paper also identifies some of the challenges involved in the development of truly interactive and collaborative agents for developing, assessing, and training large C2 organizations, and suggests a course of action for the development of such agents.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1999
Accession Number
ADA461632

Entities

People

  • Michael L. Curry

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • C4I
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircraft Carriers
  • Aircrafts
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Autonomous Agents
  • Command And Control
  • Command And Control Systems
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Environment
  • Experimental Design
  • Fighter Aircraft
  • Intelligent Agents
  • Neural Networks
  • Organizational Structure
  • Platforms
  • Sequences
  • Simulations
  • Test And Evaluation

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Systems Analysis and Design
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.

Technology Areas

  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control