A Model for Situation and Threat Assessment
Abstract
A model is presented for situation and threat assessment, with a goal of advancing the state of the art in representing, recognizing and discovering situations and, in particular, threat situations. The activity relates to levels 2 and 3 of the familiar JDL data fusion model. Level 2, Situation Assessment, involves such applications as scene understanding, force structure analysis and many other types of situational analysis. Level 3, "Impact Assessment" includes, besides threat assessment (as level 3 was originally named), course of action analysis and outcome prediction. Data fusion is the process of estimating or predicting some aspect of the world. Specifically, the data fusion process of Situation Assessment has the job of estimating or predicting situations. A situation can be defined very broadly as "any structure part of reality" (Devlin, 1991). In that structural analysis involves an assessment of the element of an entity in their relation to one another, Situation Assessment involves (a) inferring relationships, (b) inferring the states of elements on the basis of estimates of their relationships, and (c) recognizing or classifying situations on the basis of estimates of constituent elements and their relationships. In that the last of these is a recognition/classification problem, we should expect to have some similarity to target recognition and classification; i.e. the matching of data to prior models (a deductive process). As in target recognition/classification, this dependency on prior models presumes a process for generating, evaluating and selecting such models. These are characteristically abductive (i.e. explanatory) and inductive processes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA474551
Entities
People
- Alan Steinberg
Organizations
- Calspan-University of Buffalo Research Center