SSC Pacific TR 1974, November 2008

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. Modeling and simulation, intelligent software agents, and other technologies can support network-centric distributed tracking. These technologies came together in the Knowledge Management for Distributed Tracking (KMDT) research and development program to improve naval command, control, and decision support. The program's approach is based on the use of simulated data from sensor and motion models, intelligent software agents, integrated sensor ontology, and a line-of-bearing cross-fix algorithm. Modeling and simulation was used to generate test data that intelligent agents ingested to search for information that could help localize and characterize unknown contacts in the simulated battle space. In these simulations using a hypothetical scenario, intelligent-software agents were deployed over a simulated, secure Web-like network to find additional, possibly disparate, sensor data from other friendly platforms on unknown contacts. The concept of operations calls for the agents to interact with the integrated sensor ontology to facilitate distributed, heterogeneous sensor-data fusion and to reduce uncertainty. To illustrate these concepts, a simulation is described that generated 400 contact reports consisting of passive lines of bearing that were fused subsequently by intelligent agents to localize the contacts, thus demonstrating the potential of this approach to reduce information overload for the operator. The KMDT approach demonstrates how knowledge management technologies can be employed to improve situation awareness and reduce operator workload.