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Service orientation, and more recently, the notions of cloud technology that service orientation enable, are designed to accommodate the need for flexible enterprise business processes. Through standardized interfaces, a service‐oriented architecture (SOA) should enable one to build and rebuild software systems readily and rapidly in a methodological manner. However, certain domains have specialized architectural standards; an example in point is modeling and simulation (M&S), for which there exist mature architectural standards, that may even have many of the characteristics strived for in SOA. An important issue is, therefore, how to integrate specialized architectures into a wider SOA. Using defense information systems and M&S as a case, we outline a hybrid architecture framework for specialized architectures in an encompassing SOA. Although it may be possible to dissolve a specialized architecture into the encompassing SOA at implementation time, we argue that it is important to be able to model the specialized architecture as an integral intact part. We further advocate a pragmatic notion of reference architecture in terms of appropriate level of abstraction and domain specificity to avoid pitfalls that may render architecture work unusable.

Context-based reasoning is a paradigm for modeling agent behavior that is based on the idea that humans only use a small portion of their knowledge at any given time. It was specially designed to represent human tactical behavior and has been successfully implemented in systems with single agents or two agents working together. In this paper, we apply this idea in a hierarchical multi-agent system of command agents, where the agents' actions are to command and coordinate subordinates, send reports to their superiors, and communicate with other agents at the same level. We focus on how contexts and actions can be defined for these higher level command agents and how the contexts and actions for the different command agents are related. The proposed methodology is implemented and tested for a hierarchy of command agents that are interpreting and planning an operational order at a battalion level and carrying it out in a computer generated forces environment.

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