Holistan Revisited: Development of a Demonstration Scenario for Future Military Coalition Operations
Paul Richard Smart · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2008
As a fundamental research program, the International Technology Alliance (ITA) endeavours to research and develop solutions to some of the problems confronting US/UK military coalition forces. Fundamental research programs can, however, deliver scientific and technical outcomes whose immediate practical relevance and exploitation potential is sometimes not immediately obvious to members of the end-user community. To address this problem we have often found it useful to demonstrate capabilities using a combination of domain scenarios and technology demonstrators. The current report describes our efforts to develop a domain scenario and technology demonstrators within a specific component of the ITA initiative, namely Project 12 Task 1 (P12T1). P12T1 is concerned with the development and evaluation of solutions that support the large-scale integration of information from multiple sources within a distributed network environment. It also focuses on the development of knowledge accessibility solutions that support both the retrieval of task-relevant information and the monitoring of battlefield information. To provide practical demonstrations of these capabilities we have developed a pseudo-realistic domain scenario that features US and UK coalition forces jointly involved in humanitarian relief and conventional warfighting operations. The scenario provides the narrative backdrop for a number of technology demonstrations. These include the identification, integration, and retrieval of information relevant to the planning of humanitarian relief efforts; the alignment and integration of nation-specific data repositories for the purposes of improved coalition interoperability; the acoustic detection and classification of military vehicles using data fusion algorithms; and the detection of mission-critical information from battlefield event streams. All these technology demonstrations are described in the report and presented alongside the aforementioned domain scenario. The report also identifies and describes a number of collaborative linkages between P12T1 and other ITA projects. These linkages reflect the fundamental inter-dependency of research efforts within the ITA program, and they are an essential ingredient of our technology demonstration goals.