An Object Oriented Approach for Data Fusion

An new object oriented development suite for data fusion is presented. It is shown how the various issues in the data fusion development like design, implementation, simulation and testing may be supported. This allows the realisation of high sophisticated data fusion systems as applied in numerous civil and defence areas: e.g. air traffic control, coastal surveillance, vehicle guidance systems, or safety and defence applications. The approach supports the design of multi layer data fusion systems with different architecture integrating numerous different information sources. Besides of the generation of an object oriented data fusion kernel the developer is also supported in rapid prototyping just at the beginning of the developing process. Further the final software and system testing and verification within a simulated and real environment is taken into account.