Quantitative aspects of situation management: measuring and testing situation management concepts
James Llinas · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
The Data and Information Fusion domains have for some time addressed the issues involved with Situation Estimation and Situation Refinement as part of the characterization of the "higher" levels of fusion processing, meaning those levels of processing that deal with more abstract and complex world states of interest that people call "situations". It is usually agreed however that at the moment at least the research in the Data and Information Fusion (DIF) field has by far been on the aspects of estimating single and sometimes multiple-object attributes from composite observational data, and usually from electronic or physics-based sensing devices such as radars and imaging systems, that is, on the so-called "lower" levels of fusion. As both the world and the technology have changed, and as research in the DIF arena has matured, there has been a considerable interest in directing the research to methods for estimating the higher state levels of DIF, usually called Situation Refinement and Threat or Impact Refinement, and related to "Level 2" and "Level 3" of the well-known "JDL" DIF process Model (Ref 1). Note that the "refinement" term is important, implying an awareness of the fact that the focus of DIF processing is almost always on dynamic events in the world; it also reflects the need for a temporally-adaptive, recursive state estimation process.