technology today 2005 issue 4 - Raytheon

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ARCHITECTURE & SYSTEMS INTEGRATION onTechnology Raytheon Fort Wayne Showcases Key Net-centric Technologies Today’s modern battlespace is highlycomplex and requires a network-centric capability. The amount of complex data available to the modern warfighter is so prolific that it can be overwhelming. Therefore, effective automated information management is vital to success in this new warfare environment. New methods for dealing with large amounts of data need to be developed so that the warfighter has the information they need — when they need it. Tools to help the warfighter assimilate that data and make accurate, timely decisions are also a necessity. Raytheon Fort Wayne, Ind., has identified several key technologies that support the The Fort Wayne Capabilities Demonstration Team integration of both legacy and next-generation systems into the future battlespace. These include ontologies, intelligent agents, information and data fusion, automated decision-making, interactive planning, adversarial planning and cognitive radios. Our work with ontologies and intelligent agents began with the Common Relevant Operational Picture (CROP) research and development project. This effort laid the foundation for applying agent technology to determine situational relevance and provide the warfighter with enhanced decisionmaking capabilities. A key driver of this project was to define an ontology, or standard vocabulary, that represented the Command and Control problem space for the notional “Battle of Ault Park”. The ontology consisted of the domain objects and their relationships and was developed using the DARPA Agent Markup Language with the Ontology Inference Layer (DAML+OIL). The purpose of the ontology was to provide a machine-readable standard vocabulary that was used to build a knowledge base representing the specifics of the Ault Park scenario. Software agents used the knowledge base to make decisions about the data in the problem domain. These decisions went beyond static filtering; they added a cognitive aspect by providing a mechanism to add contextual reasoning and the potential to learn from past experience or prior knowledge. The CROP effort gave Raytheon Fort Wayne hands-on experience working with ontologies and intelligent agents. Plans are ongoing to evolve CROP to enhance our understanding and identify specific applications within our production systems. The second evolution of ontology work resulted in a study of automated policy. This project is funded by the Raytheon IDEA program. The Automated Policy project is evaluating the feasibility and flexibility of automated policy by prototyping a notional system that uses an ontology to describe the policies’ rules and relationships, a fact base that describes the current situation of the domain, and an inference engine that reasons on both the ontology and the fact base to derive the proper course of action. A policy-enabled capability can benefit a system that is complex (e.g., one that requires great expertise in a subject matter) and/or dynamic. It does this by separating the policies from the software. This separation allows for not only a more dynamic environment, but also keeps the policies closer to the policy makers. Some examples of military policy include Commander’s Guidance, Rules of Engagement and Course of Action. Military commanders use policy to allow or restrict missions, pair weapons with targets, allocate airspace, and request coordination, among others uses. Other examples of policy include security management, spectrum management and policies governing role-based access to information. The Automated Policy project supports Raytheon Fort Wayne in determining how this knowledge can be applied within our production systems. 20 2005 ISSUE 4 RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY YESTERDAY…TODAY…TOMORROW
The Information Fusion Engine (IFE) is an integrated data fusion prototype system — performing Level 1, 2 and portions of Level 3 fusion. It also provides automated support of Level 4 fusion (response management). Using advanced software algorithms and artificial intelligence processing techniques to fuse traditional and intelligence sensor data, the IFE system provides data fusion capability for multiple applications, including intelligence analysis workstations and ground station/airborne applications. Multiple source information (sensor processed) from different sensor types (both organic and non-organic) is fused together to provide tracking, ID determination and situation assessment through fusion levels 2/3. An extensive mission-specific database and knowledge base is an integral part of the IFE system. The system includes an embedded inference engine and an extremely efficient pattern matcher. A sophisticated C3 environmental simulator, developed using object-oriented programming techniques, was used to support the development and testing of the fusion concepts. Key fusion algorithms that were designed, implemented and tested include an advanced Kalman filter tracker for both kinematic and attribute association, an identification algorithm, and a robust spatial/temporal pattern matcher for recognizing specific weapon system/threat processes in the presence of noise and with limited sensor capabilities. On-going efforts for the IFE are focused on extending the engine architecture to support integration in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment and on migrating the engine to support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications. Interactive planning and adversarial planning are key concepts currently being explored at Raytheon Fort Wayne. Interactive planning capabilities are being developed to support the production systems at Fort Wayne and are aligned with the DARPA research in this area. Potential exploration avenues relating to interactive planning include planning in uncertainty and evaluation of plan-vs-actual to allow learning within the planning function. Raytheon Fort Wayne is currently working adversarial planning cooperatively with HRL (formerly Hughes Research Lab). Adversarial planning is based on being able to predict a given Red Team response to a Blue Team action. The Adversarial Planning project is based on a net-centric framework with plug-in agents and on a planning graph/planning repair paradigm that uses interaction with analogical reasoning and decision support agents to predict responses and “repair” the plan. The adversarial planner is entered in the International Planning Competition, which will allow developers to learn more about the work being performed in this area by other groups. The ability to assist the warfighter in planning is a core competency needed for modern warfare. Robust, reliable and timely communications for ground units operating in highly mobile and unpredictable urban environments is urgently needed and is one of the great remaining communications challenges for transforming our military into an effective net-centric force. Units at the edge of the battlespace need to communicate and exchange information. The rise of urban warfare requires connectivity when separated by urban structures, when inside and outside of buildings and when under electronic communications attack. In addition, the very dynamic nature of urban warfare requires individuals to be able to communicate with other squads and units quickly and without preplanning. Raytheon Fort Wayne is developing cognitive radio technology as a means to finally bring assured communications to ground units in the urban battlefield. Past attempts to solve this challenge have made use of increasingly sophisticated, state-of-the-art hardware, waveforms and networking protocols, and have provided only moderate success. Modern software defined radios (SDR), however, now provide a means for bringing advanced cognitive and collaborative approaches to the challenge. Raytheon Fort Wayne recognizes that assured communications and robust sharing of information inter-squad and intra-squad in challenging environments (i.e., urban combat) will only be provided by a system that is cognizant of the communication needs, the environmental conditions and the scenario being executed. The system must also use this information in a collaborative environment to adapt communication links at the YESTERDAY…TODAY…TOMORROW data link and physical layers. Our research is aligned with DARPA’s cognitive radio goals and applies modern automated reasoning and distributed processing technology to advance the state-of-the-art in urban combat communications. We are developing innovative approaches for automated learning and shared understanding of the dynamic communications environment. Cognitive engines, residing in all the individual warfighter’s SDR radios, will use distributed radio resources to maintain collective situation awareness knowledge and to collaborate on the radio and network decisions necessary for assured communications and information sharing. Raytheon Fort Wayne has shown its commitment to the advancement of key technologies by establishing a virtual technical staff (VTS) that brings together representatives from across the entire site to share ideas, leverage ongoing efforts, and be proponents of the development and application of new technologies. The VTS is led by the Raytheon Fort Wayne site technical director, Dr. Joan Mahoney, who ensures that path-finding activities are in accordance with the site’s strategic goals and provide the best solutions for our customers. A September 2005 initiative of the Fort Wayne VTS was to create an operationallyoriented integrated demonstration environment to showcase the Mission Systems Integration capabilities of the Fort Wayne site. This demonstration integrated 17 systems within a two-week time period. It was very well received by Raytheon vice president of Quality, Peter Pao, and and the Network Centric Systems (NCS) Engineering Leadership Team. The integration effort will serve as a pillar of the Enterprise Net- Centric Integration Capability (E-NIC) initiatives for NCS. Moreover, it will allow the capabilities to be shown in the context of military operations, illustrating the synergy of our applied key technologies. Paula Moss paula_c_moss@raytheon.com Kathie Irk kathie_h_irk@raytheon.com Martin Stern, Ph.D. martin_a_stern@raytheon.com RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY 2005 ISSUE 4 21 ARCHITECTURE & SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
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