14 1094-7167/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE

G u e s t E d i t o r s ’ I n t r o d u c t i o n

Knowledge Systems forCoalition OperationsAustin Tate, Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, University of EdinburghJeffrey M. Bradshaw, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, University of West FloridaMichal Pechoucek, Gerstner Laboratory, Czech Technical University, Prague

Current and future military missions will increasingly involve multinational forces.1,2

Ideally, such forces should be rapidly drawn together, flexibly

led, and responsively deployed. Moreover, these multinational

forces will need to address a wide range of dynami-

cally evolving tasks to support defensive, polic-

ing, or humanitarian missions, both locally

and throughout the world. Such missions

often involve objectives set by consen-

sus in the international community

(for example, through the United

Nations). These missions require

agility and effective use of limited

resources to achieve complex and

multiple objectives. Participants will

need to assemble and maintain a “vir-

tual organization” reflecting the inter-

ests of the participating countries and

nongovernmental organizations and their

capabilities.

The situation in these missions is typicallyfluid, resulting in frequent changes in strate-gies and objectives. Commanders requireeffective means to clearly define and relaythe mission objectives to planning and logis-tics staff, and from there to coalition partnersand field personnel. They also need means toinform the public and media and to countermisinformation.

In this context, academic, government, andindustry researchers worldwide are workingtogether to develop knowledge systems tosupport such coalition operations. Topics ofinterest to this growing community include

• Innovative theory and techniques for form-ing coalitions and supporting similar vir-tual organizations

• Applications and requirements for knowl-edge-based coalition planning and opera-tions management

• Knowledge-based approaches to com-mand and control

• K n o w l e d g e - b a s e dapproaches to coalition

logistics• Knowledge-

based approaches to Operations OtherThan War, such as peacekeeping missionsand other humanitarian operations

• The theory, principles, and practice ofusing multiagent systems in coalitionoperations

• Tools and techniques for knowledge-basedsimulation and modeling of coalition operations

• Security and maintenance of private in-formation or knowledge in coalition operations• Autonomous versus centrally managed coalition operations

The KSCO meetingsThe first Knowledge Systems forCoalition Operations meeting tookplace in Edinburgh, Scotland, inMay 1999; it focused on knowl-edge-based planning for coalitionoperations.3 At that meeting, someparticipants formed an internationalworking group to encourage inter-national collaboration on KSCO.The KSCO 2002 conference, held

in Toulouse, France, in April 2002,was the second such meeting. (The

sidebar lists URLs for the KSCO con-ferences and other related Web sites.)

It brought together practitioners and keydecision makers in coalition operation

management with researchers from knowl-edge representation and reasoning, planning,multiagent systems, and related areas to ex-change experiences and ideas, share inspira-

tion, and suggest novel concepts. Practition-ers could meet face-to-face and learn andappreciate the value of recent researchachievements. Researchers could share theirlatest ideas with a sympathetic, informedaudience and receive feedback, and coulddevelop or deepen links to potential end usersof these ideas. The conference covered a widerange of topics, including

• Organization of coalitions• Shared models or standards• Agents for coalition• Coalition architectures• Functional and operational areas• Coalition research programs

In this issueThis special issue of IEEE Intelligent Sys-

tems presents articles based on a small selec-tion of the papers from the KSCO 2002 pro-ceedings.4 It gives a flavor of the breadth ofresearch being undertaken and the intelligentsystems technologies being drawn upon tosupport coalition operations.

In “A Knowledge-Based Approach toCoalition Formation,” Michal Pechoucek,Vladimír Marík, and Jaroslav Bárta focus onthe complex problem of planning humani-tarian-relief operations. A key challenge ofthis domain is that participants in suchefforts resist central-planning approachesthat require all parties to share detailed infor-mation about goals and resources. In con-trast to these approaches, the authors com-bine classical negotiation mechanisms with

MARCH/APRIL 2002 computer.org/intelligent 15

KSCO Working Group:www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coalition/ksco

KSCO 1999 presentations:www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coalition/ksco/ksco-1999.html

KSCO 2002 proceedings:www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coalition/ksco/ksco-2002.html

Commander-in-Chief for the 21st Century (CINC 21): www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/td/3117/39.pdf.

Coalition Commander-in-Chief of the 21st Century Program (C-CINC 21):www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coalition/ksco/ksco-2002/presentations/fouse-ccinc21-ksco-2002.ppt

Joint Battlespace Infosphere: www.rl.af.mil/programs/jbi

Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (MPAT) Standard OperatingProcedures for Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW):

www.mpat.org

Useful URLs

acquaintance models and social-knowledgetechniques to reduce communication trafficand confine most information sharing to sub-communities of agents in voluntarily formedalliances.

In “Coalition Agents Experiment: Multi-agent Cooperation in International Coali-tions,” David Allsopp and his colleaguesdescribe their Coalition Agents Experiment.CoAX is an international collaboration toinvestigate and demonstrate agent-basedservices to support coalition operations inrealistic scenarios involving actual militarysystems. In CoAX, the DARPA CoABSGrid (http://coabs.globalinfotek.com) pro-vides interoperability between agent systems.CoAX uses this interoperability to structureagents into domains reflecting organiza-tional, functional, and national boundaries;security and information access policiesgovern these domains. A series of demon-strations show how agents support the rapid,coordinated construction of coalition com-mand structures for intelligence gathering,visualization, planning, and execution. Inaddition, they show how humans manage theflow of using advanced process and taskmanagement tools.

In “Force Templates: A Blueprint forCoalition Interaction within an Infosphere,”Robert Marmelstein shows how to integratean information system with coalition opera-tions. The Joint Battlespace Infosphere orga-nizes and distributes combat information toall levels of participants. In the JBI, forcetemplates are the principal mechanisms forrapidly integrating battlespace entities andclients. A force template contains the infor-mation that lets participating entities “plugin” to the JBI: identity, requirements, ser-vices, and operation mode. It also includesthe context and policy that define an entity’scontract with the JBI. So, the JBI can achievethe flexibility it needs to rapidly and reliablyshare information among coalition members.

In “Dynamic Coalition Formation amongRational Agents,” Matthias Klusch andAndreas Gerber survey results from the tra-ditional field of static-coalition formationand explain the specific properties ofdynamic coalitions. They also offer a novelscheme that enables rational agents to reactto events that occur dynamically duringcoalition formation. An agent designated asthe coalition leader continually attempts toimprove its coalition’s value, simulating pos-sible coalition reconfigurations and inform-ing members about the resulting alternatives.

In turn, the other agents report their estimatesof the quality of relevant services. By com-bining insights from several different ap-proaches and by careful experimentation,Klusch and Gerber are making steady progressin this important research area.

S ince the first KSCO meeting, muchprogress has occurred in theory,

research, and experimentation related toknowledge systems that support internationalmilitary and humanitarian-relief operations.A large multinational project exploring sys-tems for the Commander in Chief of the 21stcentury has begun a coalition element in itswork—see the sidebar for related URLs.Nevertheless, much work remains, both onthe research front to generalize and formal-ize results to date and on the application frontto test and deploy the most mature of theseresults in realistic settings.

AcknowledgmentsWe are grateful to the reviewers for this special

issue: Robert Brennan, Marco Carvalho, Joerg Den-zinger, Jim Doran, Martyn Fletcher, Jan Jelinek,Matthias Klusch, Shri Kulkarni, Michael Luck,Vladimír Marík, Jörg Müller, Paolo Petta, MihaelaUlieru, Rainer Unland, and Andrzej Uszok.

References1. Joint Doctrine for Multinational Operations,

Joint Publication 3-16, Joint Chiefs of Staff,Washington, D.C., 5 Apr. 2000; www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp3_16.pdf.

2. Multinational Planning Augmentation Team(MPAT), www.mpat.org.

3. A. Tate, ed., Proc. Int’l Workshop Knowledge-Based Planning for Coalition Forces, Artifi-cial Intelligence Applications Inst., Univ. ofEdinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999.

4. A. Tate, ed., Proc. 2nd Int’l Conf. KnowledgeSystems for Coalition Operations (KSCO2002),Artificial Intelligence Applications Inst.,Univ. of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2002;www.aiai .ed.ac.uk/project/coali t ion/ksco/ksco-2002.html.

16 computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

G u e s t E d i t o r s ’ I n t r o d u c t i o n

T h e A u t h o r sAustin Tate is the technical director of the Artificial Intelligence ApplicationsInstitute and holds the Personal Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at theUniversity of Edinburgh’s Centre for Intelligent Systems and Their Applica-tions. He works on knowledge-based planning and activity support systemsand is involved with industrial and governmental organizations deploying AItechnology in the UK, Europe, Japan, and the US. He graduated in computerstudies from the University of Lancaster and received his PhD in machineintelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Contact him at the Artificial Intel-ligence Applications Inst., Univ. of Edinburgh, 80 South Bridge, Edinburgh

EH1 1HN, UK; a.tate@ed.ac.uk; www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/bat.html.

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw is a research scientist at the University of WestFlorida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. A Fulbright SeniorScholar, he is former chair of ACM SIGART and a member of the NASAAmes RIACS Science Council and of the Autonomous Agents Steering Com-mittee. Among other publications, he coedited Knowledge Acquisition as aModeling Activity (John Wiley & Sons, 1993), Software Agents (AAAI Press,1997), Software Agents for the Warfighter (ITAC, 2002), and the forthcomingHandbook of Agent Technology (AAAI Press). He received his PhD in cog-nitive science from the University of Washington. Contact him at the Inst. for

Human and Machine Cognition, Univ. of West Florida, 40 S. Alcaniz, Pensacola, FL 32501; jbradshaw@ai.uwf.edu; www.coginst.uwf.edu/users/?jbradshaw.

Michal Pechoucek is an assistant professor in artificial intelligence at theCzech Technical University’s Department of Cybernetics. He also heads theAgent Technology Group at the Gerstner Laboratory and is a senior consul-tant with the software company CertiCon. His research focuses on agent tech-nologies, multiagent systems, coalition formation, and production planning.He received his Dipl. Ing. in technical cybernetics from the Czech TechnicalUniversity, his MSc in information technology from the University of Edin-burgh, and his doctorate in artificial intelligence and biocybernetics from theCzech Technical University. Contact him at the Czech Technical Univ., Fac-

ulty of Electrical Eng., Dept. of Cybernetics, Technicka 2, 166 27 Prague 6, Czech Republic;pechouc@labe.felk.cvut.cz; http://labe.felk.cvut.cz/~pechouc.