On-line Situation Awareness and Knowledge Acquisition (OSAKA)

Recent military operations illustrate the importance of information dominance and the need to provide enhanced battlespace situation awareness (SA) to our warfighters. Enhanced battlespace SA ensures our warfighters have the requisite information to enable timely and accurate decision-making. Advances in information and communications technologies have facilitated enhanced sensing and fusion of intelligence information, rapid processing, display, and visualization of information, and enhanced joint services and coalition communication, command, and control. The associated application and assimilation of these technologies provide a tremendous opportunity to enhance decision-making capabilities within Air Operation Centers (AOCs). Here, we propose a system for On-line Situation Awareness and Knowledge Acquisition (OSAKA). Our novel approach integrates an off-line component for knowledge acquisition and model learning and adaptation with an on-line mechanism for model instantiation and SA processing. Off-line model construction is supported via a cognitive task analysis based approach for identifying key domain requirements and a process for translating these requirements into a library of belief network (BN) based SA models. SA model adaptation and knowledge acquisition is supported via BN model structure and parameter learning. On-line model instantiation and SA processing and data visualization is addressed via the use of our commercially available belief network software.