Multi Agent-based Satellite System for Information Fusion (MASSIF)

"Recent military operations illustrate the importance of information dominance and the subsidiary need to provide enhanced battlespace awareness to the warfighter. The emergence of space-based assets offers an unprecedented opportunity to enhancebattlespace awareness. Because space-based assets are inherently distributed and are becoming even more so due to satellite clusters, achieving information dominance requires fusing large amounts of information between sensors and vehicles based onintelligence requirements. For satellite clusters, this implies that cluster management (e.g. formation planning, payload management, etc.) needs to be more closely coupled with information fusion. In cluster operations, traditional research has focused onformation control algorithms. Here, we focus on information fusion with respect to: 1) assessing the battlespace situation with respect to overall mission requirements; 2) determining the information needs based on high-level user-generated requirements;and 3) translating the information needs into high-level cluster specific tasking. We propose to develop a Multi Agent-based Satellite System for Information Fusion (MASSIF). The innovation is the application of computational intelligence techniques suchas fuzzy logic and Bayesian belief networks with distributed agent technology and messaging for information fusion in distributed systems such as spacecraft clusters. We see considerable potential for