A qualitative spatial model for information fusion and situation analysis

In this paper, we present a qualitative spatial model that is particularly suitable for situation analysis and information fusion. Situation analysis is a process that leads to situation awareness. Information fusion is an important aspect of situation analysis. Many studies have shown that, in order to support a commanding officer in gaining and maintaining situation awareness, a situation analysis support system must ensure a cognitive fit between the officer´s mental approach and the system´s interactions and processing. Spatial reasoning is one of the main mental processes that the commanding officer performs to analyze a situation. It allows for the evaluation of many key information elements that are required for situation assessment such as the location, disposition, arrangement, distance, etc, of objects. In practical situations, commanding officers mainly use qualitative spatial reasoning. Therefore, a qualitative spatial model seems to be highly suitable to ensure a cognitive fit with the mental spatial model of officers. This paper presents such a model, elaborated at Defence Research Establishment Valcartier (DREV), that is inspired from the human spatial reasoning approach and that it is particularly appropriate for the situation analysis process. It is based on the concept of the influence area, which is a portion of space that people build around objects in order to contextually reason about space, evaluate metric measures, qualify positions and distances, etc. We use the concept of influence area to formally define major spatial model. The paper shows why and how our model is well appropriate to perform the situation analysis process with regard to the cognitive fit constraint. Finally, we describe other military applications that could also benefit from such a model.