Threat assessment without situation assessment

This paper describes the design of an intelligent assistant to provide automatic situation and threat advice in the air defence ground environment (ADGE). The application is considered in terms of the required outputs, data inputs and domain knowledge. A combinatorial explosion in the number of possible relationships is seen as a problem for bottom up data fusion approaches. The approach, dubbed the axiomatic method, is proposed. In this approach a top down evaluation is used similar to classical AI theorem proving approaches. It is shown that top down evaluation avoids combinatorial explosion in the number of possible relations between entities. Plausible reasoning is proposed for representing uncertainty both for its expressive power and to manage computational complexity. The proposed approach has been tailored specifically to the characteristics of the ADGE. Assumptions which fall down in other environments such as threat assessment in a strategic environment are identified and discussed