APTIMA INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: The quantity of data that need to be collected, examined and shared during Intelligence, S

Description

The quantity of data that need to be collected, examined and shared during Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Operations is growing fast due to increasing use of sensors. To deal with this challenge, the Air Force intelligence services are implementing a new process of planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and production, and dissemination (PCPAD). PCPAD requires new technologies that collect and process only the most critical and relevant information. Aptima proposes to develop a system for Sense-making via Collaborative Agents and Attributed Networks (SCAAN) that integrates distributed situation understanding, autonomous knowledge seeking, dynamic collaboration, and an adaptive heterogeneous command and control organization. SCAAN will solve challenges of collaborative large-scale information processing by incorporating a model of dependencies between essential elements of information based on real-world processes into its distributed information sharing framework. These dependencies will be used to construct an agent organization, which assigns command and execution roles to sensor nodes and is required for reducing complexity of managing heterogeneous sensor team, and a collaboration policy, which will be based on dependencies between the tasks executed by different nodes. SCAAN will achieve reduction in data analysis time while maintaining optimality of situation estimates obtained in a distributed manner.