A teamwork test-bed for a decision support system

Resource management in complex socio-technical systems (as management and control (road, rail, sea, air), industrial engineering systems, transportation logistics, etc.) is a central and crucial process. The many diverse components involved together with various constraints such as real-time conditions make it impossible to devise exact optimal solutions. In this article, we present an approach to the resource management problem based on the multi-agent paradigm to be applied in the context of a shipboard command and control (C2) system. A general architecture for multi-agent planning and scheduling for achieving a common shared goal together with a real-time simulation environment as well as a simulation test-bed using the agent teamwork approach is described.