The scope of military conflicts and the complexity of weapons systems continue to grow at an alarming rate. While current knowledge bases contain around 10,000 axioms, future knowledge bases will contain 10 million axioms. The difference in capabilities is that, while current knowledge bases can, for example, trouble-shoot car problems, future knowledge bases will be able to design a car. This research involves creating software entities that act on the behalf of a human. Agents are typically proactive, autonomous, highly personalizable and sometimes mobile, with the capability to independently move across networks to different machines.
Agents seek out information and solve problems on their own, with little involvement from the human.
Software agents have the potential to completely revolutionize the way we use computers, making the process much more like human to human interaction. Software is often still the most difficult part in any new weapon system development. This research is developing new theoretical foundations to allow tinker toy type software development, where proven components can be easily assembled to produce complete software systems in much less time than in the past. These components can easily be re-used across different systems, and customized for the task at hand without requiring any knowledge of the underlying structure of the component. Jean Schaefer Research Highlights is published every two months by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.