Confluence™: Knowledge-based decision support in complex missions

Today's safety and security missions are exceedingly complex, and are becoming more so every day. The operational complexity arises from the growing enormity of available information as well as the participation of multiple interdependent agencies and organizations. Increasingly, decision-makers need an integrated, intelligent system that can seamlessly acquire, fuse, reason about, distribute, and protect information to provide enhanced, individualized decision support and situational understanding as well as foster effective collaboration. To meet this need, Raytheon is developing an intelligent system called Confluencetrade, which consists of an ontological framework, domain independent knowledge generation, integration, and reasoning agents, as well as various visualization components. Confluencetrade can be applied to any mission by creating a mission ontology that extends the common framework, and which explicitly defines a semantic model of the physical, information, cognitive, and social domains for the mission. This paper will describe the Confluencetrade system and demonstrate its applicability to the mission of maritime and port security.