was formed in 2001 to make the transition of a powerful set of advanced military research for the commercial market. Investment in this project dates back to 1996 when DARPA decided that the cognitive agent architecture was the best solution to the difficult problems facing the military logistics. Since no existing agent architecture can meet those needs, DARPA began funding projects to develop what became Cougaar Open Source. They developed a technological approach that suits domains beyond logistics. The work expands and tests this technology in various safe operating environments, where time is critical. The resulting solutions represent some of the more advanced reasoning and intelligent automation capabilities available and has been shown for example in DoD applications. Has spent the last two years refining these solutions as a business platform for the rapid creation and deployment of intelligent applications as robust as the military applications, but for business needs and with the economy in mind.
Timeline
Features
Cougaar agent architecture is an open source, which includes infrastructure and core services. Agents are autonomous software entities that communicate with other agents or external services for a specific domain functionality. Computing agents are based on a programming methodology that facilitates direct decomposition of complex tasks. The agents manage application behavior and environment handles systemic adaptation. The agents and the environment can develop, test and configure independently, but run together. Cougaar agent abstraction includes several integrated advanced services, such as: Cougaar agent running on a node Cougaar, which itself runs on a host. That agent agrees with one or more plugins, which define the behavior of the agent. An agent with zero plugins does nothing. Unlike other architectures based entirely on messages, Cougaar is based on blackboard plugins as main data managers. The plugins react to the data on the blackboard adding / changing / deleting notifications. The Cougaar platform infrastructure transforms the data to the blackboard in inter-dealer operations, but this is hidden from the developer API. All plugins interagency coordination is implemented through asynchronous data subscriptions. The infrastructure of the blackboard adds / changes / deletes batch notifications, providing greater robustness and scalability to the system. The entire state is stored in the blackboard, which provides support for failure recovery. The core services are Cougaar component-based implementation, covering many fields such as mobility of agents between nodes, the persistence of agent state and subsequent recovery after a crash, a transport of messages supporting multiple protocols, etc..
