Hyperion

Hyperion is a collaborative project between BT, General Dynamics, QinetiQ, Southampton University and Imperial College. It is a cluster project within the Ministry of Defence Data and Information Fusion Defence Technology Centre.

Technical Objectives

To create an adaptive agent-based architecture capable of significantly enhancing the functionality and resilience of Networked Enabled Capability (NEC) Information Fusion and C2 processes. In particular, by providing an adaptive reconfigurable capability for battlespace communication and information services.

Science Objectives

To investigate novel algorithms for self-organising network infrastructures in support of military requirements. The specific areas for research are: resilient service-oriented peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures, representation frameworks for network-centric information fusion, mixed initiative information retrieval and integration, complex policy management and control, agent negotiation protocols for NEC support, visualisation and user interaction methods for fully distributed service oriented computing in battlespace environments.

Approach

Future NEC operations will require intelligent and real-time reconfiguration of ICT services to meet bandwidth, hardware and human constraints. Hyperion is a set of distributed intelligent agents, embedded within the NEC environment, that apply dynamic goal-driven service workflows, adaptive QoS and brokering/negotiation to optimise the availability of C2 resources. The Hyperion agents are themselves connected by a self-organising peer-to-peer network that provides a high degree of resilience and availability for the services.

The Hyperion agents will respond to policy level statements that specify preferred configurations and prioritisation requirements for each information service or communication channel. The agents dynamically allocate services and compose them into distributed processes according to tasks requested. New policy requests can be hot-loaded at any time to dynamically reconfigure the agents' behaviours. A command oriented interface system enables policy level management of the system and re-tasking of network resources. It supports varying degree of human-machine interaction from fully autonomous to mixed initiative operation. The targeted value is an order-of-magnitude reduction in ICT support requirements for C2 processes, through a reduction in administrative manpower and time to reconfigure ICT services.