| Tactical decision making is an activity engaged in by military commanders, law enforcement officers and emergency response team leaders. Software agents that represent these decision makers must simultaneously consider a number of factors that complicate the decision making process. Among these factors are the requirement to reason on space and time, the need to coordinate activity among multiple cooperating and opposing entities, uncertainty and the competition between self preservation and the need to fulfill a mission.A tactical decision maker reasons on its mission in the context of a situation. Its ultimate objective is to create a course of action, which, if carried out by its subordinates, will fulfill the mission it was given.This work describes a compositional approach to military tactical decision making. In it, a behavior designer uses a template editor to create a conceptual description of a military tactic. This template has both diagrammatic and textual components and uses traditional military symbology. Later, a software agent retrieves this template from a template library and uses it to apply the tactic to a particular situation.This approach calls for the creation of composable agent behaviors. As in traditional behavior composition approaches, it allows for the specification of agent behavior using procedural primitives. But it also includes other primitives such as those for spatial reasoning and subunit coordination, which are crucial to reasoning about tactical problems. The inclusion of these additional composition primitives increases agent composability, giving the designer more control over the agent without sacrificing the agent's ability to adapt.These graphical and textual primitives are part of a tactics description language called Tesla, which was developed in support of this work. |
