Enhancing Situation-Awareness, Cognition and Reasoning of Ad-Hoc Network Agents

The role of embedded computers, which have been more widespread than conventional computers for decades already, is changing from being closed devices in dedicated applications to being open, networked components of larger systems. Cyber-Physical Systems is the term used for describing the systems that integrate physical processes and systems with networked computing systems. The formalisms used for describing Cyber-Physical Systems must accommodate projection of the physical and virtual properties of the world to the computing system in a generic way, thereby making the exchange of such data possible across systems. This thesis suggests that explicit introduction of the concept of situation awareness will help to describe and analyse the interactions and the behaviour of CyberPhysical Systems. A situation is described by a set of situation parameter values and each component in the system interprets the situation parameter values according to its own rules. The situation awareness concept allows the system’s components and the system as a whole to maintain a coherent view of the world (by exchanging situation parameter values) in order to harmonize the actions and responses of the components of the system, and help the system as a whole to behave appropriately in the current circumstances (situation). The thesis proposes that the situational information should be associated with validity information, starting for example in what area and for what period of time the situational information is valid. This approach allows dealing with the uncertainties inherent to Cyber-Physical Systems. The concept of a situational information mediator is introduced, which uses the validity information associated with situational information for acquiring and providing information relevant to system components. The thesis also presents a distributed system of systems concept that builds upon the notion of networked situation aware computing systems. A part of information, exchanged in a system of systems is in the form of situation parameter values, which are computed by individual sub-systems and shared with the other system’s components.