Towards an Architecture for Reasoning about Complex Event-Based Dynamic Situations

In this paper we are concerned with event-based situation analysis. Application areas include the understanding and awareness of complex unfolding scenarios such as homeland security threats and future battlespace engagements. The paper (i) discusses the differences between the environments/requirements for event-based management and situation management, (ii) presents an argument for an integration of an event correlation system and a situation awareness system, and (iii) proposes an integrated architecture that combines rule-based spatio-temporal event correlation and casebased reasoning for understanding and managing situations. In addition, the paper discusses the hard problem of the mutual influence between event management and situation awareness.