ActiveEdge® – Cougaar Software

ActiveEdge®, CSI’s flagship software platform, provides a full framework for building large-scale distributed intelligent decision support applications as well as a comprehensive tool suite for configuring, deploying, and monitoring them.

ActiveEdge® is considered an Open Architecture Hybrid Computing Platform, which influences design, methodology, and implementation. An Open Architecture is an architecture in which extension and reconfiguration at the component level is supported and encouraged. It enables the best of breed to be brought together and tailored to meet the specific needs of the enterprise application, without compromising the core integrity of the architecture. This is achieved through the rigorous use of standards, interfaces, abstractions, componentization, and clean separation of concerns in design. A Hybrid Computing Platform is a platform in which no single or fixed set of techniques defines capabilities of the architecture. Instead, the architecture embraces a rich diversity of techniques by providing a means through which large problems can be decomposed into reasonable pieces, and each piece can have the best technique or algorithm applied.

ActiveEdge® utilizes the following Core Design and Implementation Concepts:

Divide and Conquer problem solving approach.
Hybrid Architecture for combining the best techniques and technologies.
Distributed Asynchronous Framework for distributed, highly parallelized and scalable computing.
Integrated Security and Survivability technologies.
Human Cognitive Process Model for context-aware problem solving.

The implementation of these concepts is achieved by leveraging and blending the benefits of Open Source Cougaar, Open Interface Standards, Component-Based Architecture, and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) reliability. The result of this blend is a powerful platform supporting the development, configuration, deployment, testing, and runtime management of highly distributed intelligent decision support applications. The following sections explore each of these elements.

CSI’s model has 4 license types:

Academic: for universities
Demo: for running completed systems during test/evaluation
Development: for use during development
Production: for operational use of completed systems

CSI has 3 license scopes:

Application Enterprise: One application, any number of installs on any number of sites/locations
Application Site: One Application, any number of installs on a site/location
Application Server: One Application, One Server