Cougaar: A Robust Configurable Multi Agent Platform

Aerospace operations face unreliable, slow networks, dynamic conditions, and expensive launches. Therefore, researchers are investigating autonomous agent architectures for space system control. However, agent systems to date lack proven reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Under the UltraLog program, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored the development of the Cougaar agent architecture (open-source at http://cougaar.org), a robust reusable agent framework. UltraLog used Cougaar to build a large-scale distributed prototype planning application, which was assessed under machine kills, network cuts and degradations, and increased workload. The results indicate that Cougaar agent applications would enable reliable cost-effective aerospace applications