Architectures for Distributed Information Fusion To Support Situation Awareness on the Digital Battlefield

Future military battlefield systems, exemplified by the US Army’s Future Combat System initiative, are characterized by the extensive use of mobile sensing systems, unmanned platforms, and decision aiding systems at the lowest levels of the combat force. The effective deployment, control, and exploitation of these capabilities will require the ability to form real-time situational awareness for each warfighter using all information available. In this paper we describe previous work we have done in information fusion, and discuss the unique problems associated with supporting battlefield situational awareness. We present some candidate architectures we have evaluated for performing distributed information fusion, and discuss the approach that we are now pursuing to this problem.