Information Directorate awards $1.4 million contract

Published Nov. 15, 2006
By Francis L. Crumb
Air Force Research Lab Information Directorate

ROME, N.Y., -- The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate awarded a $1,465,002 contract Nov. 13 to Active Computing Inc. of Herndon, Va.

The three-year agreement, "Assessing & Operationalizing COORDINATORs," is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, of Arlington, Va., in support of its Coordination Decision Support Assistants, or COORDINATORs, program. The Information Directorate is the technical agent for the DARPA-funded program.

The program's objective is to create cognitive coordination managers to help fielded human units -- such as soldiers and tactical teams -- adapt their mission plans online in response to change. These intelligent distributed systems will adapt mission plans rapidly by making changes to task timing, task assignment, and selecting from pre-planned contingencies.

Coordination support will enable fielded units to respond more rapidly and more accurately to the dynamics of the situation, while incurring less cognitive load and performing with a greater degree of coordinated action.

According to Kurt Barsch, program manager in the directorate's Information Systems Division, "This contract will result in a prototype to an existing mission planning system, which will be adapted to leverage agent-based coordination technology."

Software agents have their own internal problem-solving abilities, which allow them to continuously collect specific information and determine when new information must be obtained to remain current in support of decision-makers. Agent technology has the potential to assist users with informational changes and uncertainty associated with strategy and tactics for battlefield command and control, as well as peacetime crisis management situations.