Situation management [Guest editorial]

Many domains, such as physical infrastructure and cyber security monitoring, battlefield operations management, disaster response and crisis management, and homeland security, are characterized by dense realtime sensing, large numbers of distributed heterogeneous information sources, and a variety of distributed, communicating, and network-enabled actors and agents. In these domains there is the need to automatically and continuously identify and act on complex, often incomplete and unpredictable dynamic situations. As a result, effective methods of situation recognition, prediction, reasoning, and control are required - operations collectively identifiable as situation management.