Ancile: Pervasively Shared Situational Awareness

Ancile is a distributed architecture for information sharing that satisfies the needs of tracking personnel and notifies them of events of interest in their vicinity. It was demonstrated to be effective in notifying soldiers to mortar rounds that were already in the air; the soldiers who would have been hit by the rounds had sufficient time to leave the impact area before impact. This article describes extensions to the Ancile architecture that make it significantly more flexible and allow it, for instance, to support notifications to emergency response personnel in times of crisis.