A Formal Framework for Situation Awareness

Situational awareness (SAW) is a very important component in the military decision making process. The basis for SAW is knowledge of objects in a situation, e.g., units and obstacles in a military battlefield, and relations among those objects,particularly those relevant to the goals of the current operation. In Phase I we developed a formalization of SAW and a methodology for reasoning about higher-order relations. We demonstrated how a situational scenario can be described using ontologieswritten in DAML and how the relations relevant to a set of user defined goals can be inferred, including fusion of uncertain, multi-source information. In Phase II we will develop an automated SAW Assistant (SAWA) that facilitates every step in our formalmethodology including ontology and model generation, rule construction, Level 1 event management, situational state management, derivation of relations by reasoning agents, and interaction with the user through a graphical interface. We will demonstratethe effectiveness of the system on multiple scenarios defined in the context of the DAML Experiment (focusing on Joint Vision 2020 strategic objectives). We will also refine and extend our formalization of SAW by incorporating multiple forms ofuncertainty and address the computational complexity of relation derivations.