Investigating concepts for determining complex sensing system trustworthiness

The wide-ranging Layered Sensing concept is critical to providing timely, actionable, trusted, and relevant universal situation awareness (USA) to war fighters in both military and humanitarian operations. The layered sensing concept allows existing and future sensor systems to operate within a largely autonomic, collaborative, yet complex, system of systems (SoS) environment that is robust, agile and adaptable. The authors believe that USA is possible within such a complex sensing system environment, but only where the human systems´ operators or product users (and potentially internal components) believe they can trust the information produced by that system. Gaining an attribution of trust by the human (and cyber) user, however, is expected to be a significant challenge. The authors believe that monitoring and reporting the system´s security, safety, and reliability status (both current and predicted) can establish an understanding of trustworthiness for layered sensing implementations. Leveraging techniques similar to those employed by traditional reliability engineering, along with other measures, may have potential for enabling the computation of reliability metrics as part of a broader suite of trustworthiness metrics for complex systems. Investigation is necessary to identify measurable attributes of Layered Sensing system components that are both efficiently collectable and effectively relevant to system reliability and trustworthiness. Further, adequate analytical models to transform these collected measures into accurate status representations in realtime must be developed. Finally, a virtual and constructive modeling and simulation (M&S) framework is envisioned for studying how selected system attributes contribute to system reliability metrics that are accurate and accepted by human operators.