Architecting agents for collaborative air combat using a team-centered design aproach

The United States Air Force seeks to develop “Collaborative Combat Aircraft” to provide an affordable force multiplier. Current Artificial Intelligence (AI) research efforts often focus on developing the AI necessary to support task work within target domains without sufficiently considering integration in existing systems, including the capabilities necessary to enable the teamwork required to enable human-AI teams. The current research employs a recently published team-oriented analysis and design method, referred to as Agent-Oriented Systems Modeling (AOSM), to provide an architecture-level analysis of the human-AI team to establish requirements for the AI systems in both manned and unmanned aircraft. The approach is applied to an F-16 formation performing defensive counter air, to evaluate task and teamwork requirements within the analogous system. These requirements, namely the goals, responsibilities, and capabilities of the agents in the existing system are then applied to envision the “To-Be” system to ensure equivalent or greater capabilities exist in the proposed architecture. This analysis produces numerous traceable findings that can be applied to establish system level requirements for future development to ensure effective human-AI teaming, including 45 capabilities required of the system and five agent roles to be fulfilled in the “To-Be” system. The project discusses and supports the importance of efficient communication and coordination mechanisms for all AI agents when teaming with the human pilot.