电子水手就是工业界称为代理软件(agents)的东西。电子水手工作在电脑显示屏之后:它们是嵌入在系统结构中的一段软件程序,其功能是监控要它们干的事情。当某些要求他们所监控的事情发生时,它们将做出某种特定的反应,这就使网络中心水下战成为了一种数据驱动的,而非操纵者驱动的过程。建立了这种结构,现在就能在网络中心水下战实施过程中实现“从数据到决策”的方法论,其工作方式与工业中的数据驱动智能结点体系结构完全一致。在多线程环境中运行许多这样的数据驱动的进程,就能使数据自动地馈 Electronic sailors are what the industry calls agents. Electronic sailors work behind computer screens: they are software programs embedded in the system’s fabric whose function is to monitor what’s going on with them. When something is going to happen that requires them to monitor, they will react in a certain way, making the hub-and-spoke submarine war a data-driven rather than an operator-driven process. With this structure in place, a “data-to-decision” methodology can now be implemented in a network-centric underwater war effort that works in exactly the same way as the data-driven intelligent node architecture in industry. Running many such data-driven processes in a multithreaded environment allows the data to be automatically fed