6.6.6 Other features and implementation

The EA responds to other requests, such as calls for fire, which are described in Section 6.7. Several other capabilities were implemented to make the EA easier to use and understand. Two are briefly mentioned here. We implemented a GUI, not meant for military users, but rather to facilitate evaluation and understanding of the EA. The GUI displays all alerts in different scrollable windows for each priority level, the current time, and the current mission of each subordinate of the EA owner.

The user can confirm mission starts and ends locally, although this might be done with voice or some other modality in a fielded system. When a confirmation arrives from a subordinate EA, the confirmation window for that mission is destroyed. Thus, confirmations and prompts can be given locally or received in messages, with a seamless interleaving of those two types of confirmation.

The EA, PA, mission model, PRS and SIPE-2 are implemented in COMMON LISP, CLIM, and CLOS. The EA also contains procedural knowledge in the form of Acts. SAIM was implemented in C++ and Java, using the ACE Object Request Broker for CORBA. C++ was used to interface the EA to SAIM and CORBA.