Cooperative situation assessment in a maritime scenario

In large-scale, complex domains such as space defense and security systems, situation assessment and decision making are evolving from centralized models to high-level, net-centric models. In this context, collaboration among the many actors involved in the situation assessment process is critical in order to achieve a prompt reaction as needed in the operational scenario. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent based approach to situation assessment, where agents cooperate by sharing local information to reach a common and coherent assessment of situations. Specifically, we characterize situation assessment as a classification process based on OWL ontology reasoning, and we provide a protocol for cooperative multi-agent situation assessment, which allows the agents to achieve coherent high level conclusions. We validate our approach in a real maritime surveillance scenario, where our prototype system effectively supports the user in detecting and classifying potential threats; moreover, our distributed solution performs comparably to a centralized method, while preserving independence of decision makers and dramatically reducing the amount of communication required.