Enhancing Battlefield Situational Awareness through Fuzzy-Based Value of Information

A major tenet of the US Army´s data-to-decision initiative and a primary challenge for military commanders and their staff is the ability to shorten the cycle time from data gathering to decisions. Today, military operations require information from an unprecedented number of sources resulting in an unprecedented volume of collected data. Required are decision support technologies to improve the synthesis of data to decisions. Paramount to this process is the ability to better assess the applicability and relevance of information for decisions in complex military environments. Towards this end, this paper presents a soft computing approach and early results for calculating the Value of Information (VoI) in complex military environments using fuzzy associative memory as an effectively framework for contextually tuning its value based on content, reliability and latency.