Enhanced Collaborative-Software Environment for Information Fusion at the Unit of Action

摘要

This report describes research associated with the development of a highly responsive decision-support technology that can improve the effectiveness of analysts and decision makers - within the Army's Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs). These analysts and decision makers must work with large data volumes- in time-constrained and uncertain operating environments. This joint research and proof-of-concept effort involved the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), BBTech Corporation, and the U.S. Army RDECOM CERDEC Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate, Fort Monmouth, NJ.- This final report focuses on the UMass portion of the effort. This research was performed in the context of the CIFA (Collaborative Information-Fusion Assistant) decision-support environment, a prototype suite of tools and technologies developed jointly in this effort. CIFA can augment and support Army personnel in answering Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) associated with monitoring, assessing, and responding to enemy courses of action and other battlespace-environment - characteristics. At present, time constraints and information overload often result in hasty, partial analysis of the information available to intelligence personnel. CIFA helps Army analysts and decision makers focus their attention on appropriate data by providing spatially - and temporally aggregated views of the environment and by ensuring that important information has not been overlooked. Research activities were performed in three main areas: (1) blackboard-based temporal and spatial aggregation and abstraction; (2) presentation of real-time battlespace assessments and user alerts; and (3) principled integration of sensor data, human-generated reports, and automated processing results. This report discusses the issues we addressed, the techniques we developed and our evaluations of them, and lessons learned.