Concepts and strategies for distributed information-sharing

The focus of this paper is on understanding the nature of the communication environment, needs, and what we call strategies for optimizing distributed situation assessment among a group of nodes that each have their own automated data fusion (DF) processes and reside in a particular data/communications topology with particular characteristics. We do not however address at this time the complications due to the topology and the communication system characteristics and parameters. Our focus is strictly on trying to understand the nature of the data sharing problem. We assume a common-sense model of agents involved in situation assessment