Network-centric warfare (NCW) aims to exploit modern communications and information processing technologies, through the effective networking of heterogeneous geographically dispersed forces, to deliver a competitive advantage to military operations (for background information, you may want to read my earlier review on this topic [1]).

A foundational element in NCW is the ability to collect, distribute, correlate, and process information collected by various assets: sensors, humans, information systems, and databases. This, in turn, implies the availability of a flexible infrastructure to integrate unmanned systems in the battlefield, agile logistics, and systems to model and predict adversary intent. In many cases, the applications sitting on top of such infrastructure operate in highly decentralized environments, where centralized supervision needs to be supplemented by autonomous, intelligent decision making.

This new book provides a collection of refereed papers published in the last two years on the topic of intelligent autonomous agents and their application to command and control systems, military communications, surveillance systems, autonomous systems, and human-computer interfaces. The broad range of applications and techniques presented offers a varied overview of the state of the art. The nine chapters that compose the book are grouped in three loosely structured sections; readers can cover them in whatever order they choose.

The first section covers multiagent approaches to the development of information infrastructures (peer-to-peer middleware, information-based control of sensor networks, semantic matchmaking of intelligence resources, and agent applications in defense logistics). The second section deals with agent-based technologies in air-traffic control (multiagent technology for free-flight air traffic control, control of teams of unmanned air vehicles, fighter-pilot simulation, and wargaming using multiagent systems). The third and final section discusses the use of agents for simulation and training.

The book is an interesting read if you want to learn more about practical applications of intelligent agents in the defense domain. Interested readers are also referred to the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology [2] to obtain additional up-to-date information on related topics.