Decentralized systems merit a detailed analysis in view of the potential advantages that they offer. These include significant improvements in fault tolerance, modularity and scalability. Such attributes are required by a number of systems that are currently being planned within the defence and civil aerospace sectors.A recognized difficulty with the decentralized network architecture is the potential it creates for redundant data to proliferate as a result of cyclic information flows. This can lead to estimation biases and divergence. Solutions which require the network information sources to be tagged in some way are not generally possible without relaxing some of the constraints on which the decentralized paradigm is founded. This paper consequently investigates a different approach. Specifically, it examines the application of the Covariance Intersection (CI) data fusion technique. CI is relevant to the redundant data problem because it guarantees consistent estimates without requiring correlations to be maintained. The estimation performance of CI is compared here, with respect to a restricted Kalman approach, for a dynamic multi-platform network example. It is concluded that a hybrid CI/Kalman approach offers the best solution, since it exploits known independent information and unknown correlated information without having to relax the decentralized constraints.
Technical developments to our work in the area of communications management in decentralised data fusion systems are described. These include combining identification and tracking sub-systems into a single simulator, and increasing the complexity of the sensing model, communication model, and target/platform trajectories. These technological developments are employed to indicate which is the most appropriate communications management philosophy: (i) one based on identification only, (ii) one based on tracking only, or (iii) one based on identification and tracking in combination. The paper concludes that, for the scenario investigated, communications management based purely on identification provides good identification performance but poor track performance. The converse was true when the management was based purely on track information. However, when the communication management decision philosophy was based on both identification and track, good performance in both sub-systems was achieved.
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