Distributed, agent-based high level information: Challenges and solutions

In today´s fast paced military operational environment, vast amounts of information must be sorted out and fused not only to allow commanders to make situation assessments, but also to support the generation of hypotheses about enemy force disposition and enemy intent. An automation methodology and support tools are required to allow commanders to model and assess dynamic situations such as the behavior and intentions of enemy forces based on the flow and fusion of collected information from various sensors. Battlefield situation awareness, including location, movement, and deployment of enemy forces, is essential for commanders to make better decisions than adversaries. Agent-based information fusion and dissemination has great promise to considerably enhance current fusion technology. However, in order for agent-based information fusion to become a reality it must address a multitude of challenges. These challenges can be divided into three general categories: (a) challenges that relate to communication and information dissemination among the different agents in the system, (b) challenges pertaining to algorithms that individual agents use for effective reasoning, and (c) challenges related to integration of overall system aspects and components. In the rest of this overview, we present and discuss what we consider the most important subcategories within these three categories of challenges and briefly summarize work we have done to address them.