ActiveEdge® – An
Intelligent Distributed Agent Platform

Cougaar Software’s ActiveEdge® is an intelligent
agent-based middleware platform for building complex,
distributed, intelligent applications. ActiveEdge is a mature,
proven commercial product, not a lab prototype we hope to
someday commercialize. ActiveEdge has over a dozen companies
and 100+ developers that are trained and capable of building
applications using the platform. ActiveEdge is built on the
Cognitive Agent Architecture (Cougaar)—an open source,
distributed agent architecture. ActiveEdge provides all the
power of Cougaar and includes key extensions to simplify
application development, increase agent functionality, and
provide enhanced system capabilities. ActiveEdge is designed
to transform data into usable knowledge and provides advanced
situational awareness, creating an understandable real-time
picture of current enterprise operations. In addition,
ActiveEdge provides advanced execution monitoring and
collaborative decision support. Cougaar Software’s goal is to
provide application developers the platform foundation for
building the next generation intelligent system – systems that
maintain a representation of a situation that focuses on the
current relevance of information to an end-user and that
enables intelligent reasoning, secure collaboration, advanced
data management, dynamic updates, and custom, rule-based
processes.

ActiveEdge uses a distributed intelligent agent
architecture based on the human cognitive model of reasoning
and planning. This advanced software model captures the way
humans observe, reason, plan, and act. It allows you to
automate the complex processes humans do everyday more
realistically and robustly than other traditional
technologies.

ActiveEdge is the first commercial platform to be based on
the technologies and methodologies of the Cognitive Grid, the
integration of Intelligent Agents, Semantic Web and Grid
technologies into a unified platform for intelligent systems.
The foundation is intelligent agents, but the addition of the
Semantic Web allows the computer to understand the meaning of
the concepts it is reasoning over, rather than merely
manipulating them as tokens of an unknown language. The Grid
technologies, empower both the Service Orientation as well as
the distributed resource management and other scalable,
distributed features of the architecture.

Intelligent agents, the core of the Cognitive Grid and
ActiveEdge, are software entities that operate continuously
and autonomously in a particular environment. An agent’s
responsibilities are defined by the behaviors that have been
built into it, and agents carry out their activities in a
flexible and intelligent manner that is responsive to changes
in the environment. Agents can adjust behavior dynamically to
fit the current situation, determining how their actions and
behaviors should change as events change. Agent-based systems
represent the next major advancement in network computing and
leverage the strengths of object-oriented, peer-to-peer and
service-oriented architectures while providing a
process-centric design. The real value is that intelligent
reasoning occurs at each level of the system to reduce overall
system load and increase quality, control, and responsiveness.
The key benefits of agent technology come in these areas:

Dynamic Re-planning – The ability to
develop and modify distributed workflows using rules and
domain knowledge that is appropriate to the current
situation. This benefit allows enterprises to create more
accurate and appropriate plans and to react more quickly and
appropriately when conditions change.

Advanced Data Mediation – The ability
to gather and process data from multiple diverse sources
into a single environment so that it is appropriate for the
current situation.

Situational Awareness – The ability to
build and maintain a virtual world representation of the
current situation on which intelligent reasoning can occur.

Collaborative Information Management –
The ability to easily share information and coordinate
changes across your enterprise.

Intelligent Reasoning – The ability to
emulate the way humans observe, reason, plan, act, and
monitor at computer speeds.

Scalable, Distributed Computing – The
ability to handle massive amounts of data across the
enterprise while providing more efficient processing.

Business Process Adaptation/Evolution –
The ability to allow significant business changes to be
implemented quickly and dynamically by actual users who can
easily manage adjustments to the business rules or
policies—without engaging consultants to significantly alter
their systems. This benefit allows enterprises to be agile
and adaptive as conditions change, thus saving valuable
costs in process re-engineering.

ActiveEdge is fully
Web Service-compliant and supports many of the current web,
java and messaging protocol standards. ActiveEdge offers a
full framework for building intelligent applications in
distributed network SOA and Grid environments. Based on
existing standards and open technologies like Java, SOAP, OWL,
XML, and the Cognitive Agent Architecture (Cougaar),
ActiveEdge enables development of higher level services,
dynamic service planning and advanced knowledge mediation and
management.

ActiveEdge is is highly scalable and designed to transform
massive amounts of disparate data into situationally grounded
actionable knowledge. With our powerful Distributed Data
Environment (DDE), ActiveEdge lets you efficiently and
reliably gather, integrate, distribute, and manage large
volumes of complex data from diverse sources and models.
Applying modern Semantic Web concepts and the W3C standard on
Web Ontology Language (OWL), The DDE has defined a rich data
model, which allows application developers to easily define a
semantically rich object model to represent information from
available data sources and services. ActiveEdge creates an
understandable real-time picture of the current situation as
well as provides advanced event management, execution
monitoring, and collaborative decision support. Based on
modern game theory techniques, situation management
(situational knowledge, situational understanding or
situational awareness) is one of the most innovative
components of the ActiveEdge architecture. It is based on our
unique situational reasoning framework (SRF), which
incorporates hybrid object-semantic domain model to allow
accurate representation of the situation and enable users to
more effectively understand and act on the situation.

In SOA environments, intelligent reasoning and planning for
data collection, fusion, analysis and results presentation
requires the sequential invocation of services with support
for mediation and transformation of intermediate results.
Performing such a service plan in a fixed environment is easy,
dynamically creating a service plan in response to an complex
and evolving situation requires advanced reasoning and dynamic
planning not found in conventional architectures. Intelligent
agents, combined with capabilities like semantic service
discovery, enable higher level services that allow SOA
environments to be utilized to their fullest potential even
under new emerging problems. ActiveEdge provides a
user-friendly visualization tool that lets users quickly and
easily create task-specific, collaborative applications. In
addition, users can modify process flows graphically without
changing any code—they can easily ‘drag-and-drop’ components
from one application to another. In the middleware layer, the
robust ActiveEdge Distributed Data Environment (DDE) offers
advanced information management and data mediation
capabilities and can support volumes of data from diverse,
distributed sources and models, integrating that data into a
single environment. The DDE supports secure, selective, and
seamless data integration and collaboration among sites in the
same organization as well as with employees, partners, and
customers at different sites. The ActiveEdge DDE is a
state-of-the-art data mediation system that supports advanced
mediation and mapping, selective data replication, and
intelligent querying using standard and object query
constructs as well as higher level, advanced semantic-based
queries.

The core services of ActiveEdge systems act on the
situational picture to support functional processes and
applications. And, these functional applications use the
situation and core services to perform functional planning,
reasoning, display, and analysis for users. With ActiveEdge,
situations are monitored, and, depending on defined events,
actions are generated according to user-defined business rules
and workflows. Software agents can build and/or adjust these
business rules and processes based on rule patterns and their
ability to learn from prior actions. The situation management
component uses situational and domain agents, or reasoners, to
translate an event or group of events into a meaningful
situation in the current context and situation. The context
includes the set of actions the system is performing, the set
of events received, and the actions currently operating on the
system. The domain controllers correlate events and reason
about the changes to the situation that result, considering
not only primary impacts, but also secondary and tertiary
impacts.

Contact
us for more info