Situation Understanding

At ATL, we develop decision-aids, information fusion, and inference technology to ensure that engaged military units have a clear understanding of the situation at hand.

Objectives

Modern military operations are flooded with information from many sources. Clear situation understanding requires combiningÑor fusingÑcritical information from a variety of sources in near real-time. We are developing revolutionary decision-aiding capabilities using information fusion, intelligent inference, plan understanding, and adjacent market research to identify technology directions for the future and to produce critical discriminators for Lockheed Martin products.

Key Technologies

Situation Understanding is the goal of every fighting force in today's military. Our computing systems can assemble actionable information from data to help realize this goal. Sharing pertinent information throughout military echelons becomes an even greater challenge in the Joint warfighting arena against an asymmetric threat. Our controlled, closed-loop use of sensing and computing resources satisfies the commander's priority information requirements and plans, and our up-to-the-minute situation-understanding technology supports continuous, high optempo operations.

Key technologies developed include:

• Plan-execution monitoring technologies that allow commanders and operations centers to concurrently track the progress of many missions and, if necessary, replan missions for unexpected threats or exploit new opportunities.
• Levels 2-4 fusion that collects and aggregates diverse sources of related information, develops enemy courses of action, and enables plan-driven information fusion.
• Agent-based computing that permits rapid assessment of information needs and available distributed information, continuous monitoring of information and data sources, and integration of legacy systems into the modern battle environment.
• Multi-sensor fusion that offers kinematic classification and correlation of diverse sensor sources to support all phases of situation awareness.

Applications and Transition Opportunities

We are directly supporting situation understanding in these programs:

• Real-Time Multi-sensor Data Fusion; Grapevine intelligent dissemination of track data between aircraft; and Intelligent Agent-Based Information gatheringÑsupporting the U.S. Army's Hunter Standoff Killer Team Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration.
• Tactical Overwatch using Sensemaking Services, Cross-Domain Information Dissemination, Web Services-Based Architecture, and Lead System Integration for the U.S. Army's Collateral Space Node in Office of the Secretary of Defense's Horizontal Fusion Program.
• Plan Analysis Associate, Monitor Associate, Impact Assessment Associate, trigger re-plan, when warranted for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Joint Air-Ground Unified Adaptive Replanning program.

Situation Understanding is one of several Business Areas for the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory