Accelerating Common Operational Pictures through network consensus

The maintenance of a consistent Common Operational Picture based on sensor/agent networks can be very challenging for high-tempo situations. Moreover shorter times for detecting threats are advantageous for air, land, and marine forces. An enabler to early detections is the autonomous adjustment of each sensor/agent contribution to the Common Operational Picture so that all sensors/agents “agree” faster. In this publication we first identify degrees-of-freedom variables available in a generic Common Operational Picture for accelerating the consensus among a network of sensors/agents with unidirectional (one-way) random communications. Then we exploit a recent sub-network (or localized) consensus concept, originally developed for networks represented by continuous-time models, and we extend the accelerated consensus results to networks modeled as discrete-time dynamical systems by adapting edge weights of directed graphs. Consequently the present development facilitates digital implementations. An example is used to convey concepts and provide results.