Enabling Battlefield Visualization: an Agent-based Information Management Approach Topic: Human Factors Engineering

A key task of a commander is that of Battlefield Visualization – understanding the situation in order to make decisions to achieve operational goals. Central to this process is managing the information needed to make those decisions. As the battlefield becomes more complex, and the stresses on commanders more apparent, the need for automated tools to reduce the burden only increases. In this paper, we identify the requirements of a system for enabling battlefield visualization through automating the information management process. We describe an architecture for information management using intelligent interface agents to assist a commander with battlefield visualization. Our approach focuses on a knowledge-driven process of information management, in which the commander’s information requirements (CCIRs) are understood within the current context by automatically decomposing them into specific, sensor-relevant collection needs, tasking available collection assets to gather the data to answer the information requirements, then fusing that data into decision-relevant knowledge to be presented to the commander. We describe the results of our effort and a feasibility prototype to illustrate the central ideas of our approach.