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 situation awareness 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 provides a tremendous opportunity to enhance decision-making capabilities within Air Force 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 mechanism for rapid construction of Bayesian belief network (BN) SA models with an on-line model adaptation and knowledge acquisition scheme. 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 BN-based SA models. On-line SA and knowledge acquisition is supported via BN evidence propagation and model parameter learning. We see considerable potential for this approach in enhancing Air Force AOC SA requirements and addressing future information dominated battlespace requirements.