Information Fusion: A High-Level Architecture Overview

Over the past decade the term Fusion has become synonymous with tactical or battle space awareness after hostilities have begun. As such, work has concentrated on object identification, tracking algorithms and the use of multiple sources for reducing uncertainty and maximizing coverage. As more situations unfold throughout the world, smart strategic decisions must be made before deployment of our limited assets. In order to assess adversarial intent and possible strategic impact, we need to enlarge the present scope of fusion to take into account strategic situation awareness and what information technology can be provided to support it. By doing so, the sooner a situation can be understood in its full context, the more options that become available and the more thoroughly its criticality can be evaluated.