Agents in logistics planning: experiences with the coalition agents experiment project

Military logistics planning is a complex process, involving many calculations, satisfaction of constraints, and cooperation amongst many organisational entities that provide services in order to achieve military logistics goals. Multi-Agent Logistics Tool (MALT) is a project aimed at supporting military logistics planning. MALT is being developed using agent technology, where agents represent the organisations within the logistics domain, and model their logistics functions, processes, expertise, and interactions with other organisations. Agents are a suitable technology for modelling organisations within MALT, due to the similarity in characteristics between organisations and agents. A component of MALT was implemented within DARPA's Coalition Agent Experiment (CoAX) project. We discuss the CoAX implementation of MALT, and lessons learnt. We discovered that implementing a centralised agent planning approach within MALT, and hence the decentralised military (operational) logistics planning domain, may not always be appropriate, and that a decentralised agent planning approach may be more suitable. Some of our observations regarding the future of agents for military logistics planning are discussed.