Agent Modeling in Antiair Defense

Abstract

This research addresses rational decision making and coordination among antiair units whose mission is to defend a specified territory from a number of attacking missiles. The automated units have to decide which missiles to attempt to intercept, given the characteristics of the threat, and given the other units’ anticipated actions, in their attempt to minimize the expected overall damages to the defended territory. Thus, an automated defense unit needs to model the other agents, either human or automated, that control the other defense batteries. For the purpose of this case study, we assume that the units cannot communicate among themselves, say, due to an imposed radio silence. We use the Recursive Modeling Method (RMM), which enables an agent to select his rational action by examining the expected utility of his alternative behaviors, and to coordinate with other agents by modeling their decision making in a distributed multiagent environment. We describe how decision making using RMM is applied to the antiair defense domain and show experimental results that compare the performance of coordinating teams consisting of RMM agents, human agents, and mixed RMM and human teams.

This research has been sponsored by the Office of Naval Research Artificial Intelligence Program under contract N00014-95-1-0775, and by a research initiation grant from the CSE Department of the University of Texas at Arlington.