Data exchange for shared situation awareness

Abstract

The Command and Control (C2) system that provide information to the actors in a conflict has always been a key target for technology advancement. The ongoing development of automated digital military information systems has enabled, and is demanding the development of specific functional area support systems. The focus of communication systems and methods is shifting away from human to human communication towards human to machine and machine to machine communication. Along with this change have come proliferation of operating systems, data representation schemata, data exchange methods and other aspects that now confront us with a "confusion of languages" [1].The paper describes the information exchange issues and challenges involved in creating shared situation awareness in the described systems. Some existing models for both information representation and exchange are described and a proactive communication model for information exchange in a distributed system is presented. The proactive communication model caters for the data requirements of the data consumers, the objective being to provide the information required for forming good situational awareness of the data consumer. The proactive communication model relies on a middleware [5] that is able to acquire the information required by the consumer and to cater for the restrictions set by the data consumer on the requested data. The paper describes the middleware and how it can be applied in the above-described systems.Index Terms -cooperative distributed systems, interactive computing, middleware (for subscription and distribution of situational information), situation awareness, validation and verification

Generating situation awareness in cyber-physical systems

“…The proactive middleware has a role in inter-system communication and in principle it can be also applied in intra-system communication. Both the concept of ProWare and its implementations in simulation and practical applications has been previously described in [8], [9] and [10].…”

“…We suggest the use of a distributed proactive middlewareProWare [8] to implement mediated interactions in real cyberphysical systems. The proactive middleware has a role in inter-system communication and in principle it can be also applied in intra-system communication.…”

Model for sharing the information of cyber security situation awareness between organizations

“…SA depends on the person's competence and understanding of the specific task related events and phenomena [1], [3], [4] and the situation picture such as Common Operational Picture (COP) is a presentation of all the task related information available for the person [4]. In many cases the information originates from a large amount of data and multiple sensor feeds which are automatically fused using multi-sensor data fusion processed, for example according to JDL model by the US Joint Directors of Laboratories Data Fusion Sub-Group [3], [5], [6], [7].…”

“…One example of Tactical Data Links is The Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS) Link16 the high-capacity, ECM-resistant, secure data link for voice and data [16]. In C2 systems the shared information can be owned by different stakeholders with different geographical locations, different missions or even different security clearances [5]. Good real life example of that is the usage of Air Situation Data Exchange (ASDE) during the Euro Championship 2012 where NATO Programming Centre (NPC) supported Poland in the air situation data exchange with national organizations [17].…”

Time-selective data fusion for in-network processing in ad hoc wireless sensor networks

“…The WSN middleware for handling the subscriptions for exchanging SA information has been introduced in our previous work. 5 In this article, we consider the communication between asynchronous WSN nodes -meaning that clocks in different nodes are not synchronized and the start-up, data production and consumption processes in the nodes are activated independently from each other. The nodes in the network may employ different operating modes or duty cycling schemes and incorporate several heterogeneous sensors, with different modalities, characteristics and sampling frequencies.…”