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70 Years of Defence Science at the 'Bend

DSTO is a world leader in the use of artificial intelligence in the form of intelligent agents to represent human decision-making in combat simulation software.

DSTO is a world leader in the use of artificial intelligence.

This technology enables DSTO to assess the effectiveness of Australian Defence Force (ADF) capabilities under simulated combat conditions. These assessments are then used to make informed decisions about current A D F capabilities and priorities for future development.

DSTO and Agent Oriented Software Pty Ltd (AOS) have collaborated on the continued enhancement of graphical tools to make the development of intelligent behaviours in simulation easier. AOS has incorporated the graphical tools into its core product, JACK Intelligent AgentsTM, to form an enhanced graphical development environment suitable for military analysts.

JACK is an environment for building, running and integrating realistic, multi-agent systems using a component-based approach. It provides the ability to model reasoning behaviour according to the well-established Belief Desire Intention (BDI) model of artificial intelligence. AOS has commercialised the capability to model team-based military operations in their ‘JACK Teams’ software. Both the Graphical User Interface and teaming technologies were developed collaboratively with DSTO.

In 2004, a world-first in autonomous Intelligent Agent-controlled flight was achieved by an unmanned aerial vehicle. The successful first flight, undertaken by DSTO and AOS, convincingly demonstrated both in-flight Intelligent Agent control of the aircraft and fully autonomous mission selection capabilities.