A Novel Architecture for Situation Awareness Systems

Situation Awareness (SA) is the problem of comprehending elements of an environment within a volume of time and space. It is a crucial factor in decision-making in dynamic environments. Current SA systems support the collection, filtering and presentation of data from different sources very well, and typically also support some form of low-level data fusion and analysis, e.g., recognizing patterns over time. However, a still open research challenge is to build systems that support higher-level information fusion, viz., to integrate domain specific knowledge and automatically draw conclusions that would otherwise remain hidden or would have to be drawn by a human operator. To address this challenge, we have developed a novel system architecture that emphasizes the rôle of formal logic and automated theorem provers in its main components. Additionally, it features controlled natural language for operator I/O. It offers three logical languages to adequately model different aspects of the domain. This allows to build SA systems in a more declarative way than is possible with current approaches. From an automated reasoning perspective, the main challenges lay in combining (existing) automated reasoning techniques, from low-level data fusion of time-stamped data to semantic analysis and alert generation that is based on linear temporal logic. The system has been implemented and interfaces with Google-Earth to visualize the dynamics of situations and system output. It has been successfully tested on realistic data, but in this paper we focus on the system architecture and in particular on the interplay of the different reasoning components.