Analyzing the quality of a system's perception of its information environment with special application to distributed military systems

To take advantage of recent and future advances in communications and information processing technology, military systems of the 21st century will create systems that enable the elements to operate as nodes in a geographically distributed information collection and processing network. Each network node is immersed in its local information environment. If a node is isolated from the rest of the system, then its perception of - as well as its response to the system's information environment is strictly local and based only upon data provided by its local sensor observations. However, completely autonomous responses to such locally determined perceptions can be undesirable from certain global network level perspectives. Fratricide, multiple engagements by weapons platforms and saturation of sensor resources by soft-kill weapons usage are all examples of unintended consequences of ignoring the global picture. In those cases where the exercise of some degree of coordination between individual platform elements is required for global coordination, it is necessary to have available for use by the system's decision functions sufficiently representative perceptions of pertinent aspects of the system's universal information environment. Such a network of perceptions must necessarily be synthesized using the mixture of measurements gathered from the local information environments of individual platform sensors. A method for quantifying the quality of perceptions has been developed. This method enables one to study several important system level problems from a perception quality perspective.