Generic software architecture for development of data fusion systems

This paper describes a generic software platform which can be used for simulation, prototyping and implementation of real time data fusion systems and for training of data fusion engineers. This platform is based on the definition of a set of asynchronous "data processing nodes" cooperating by interchange "lists of data". Those data processing nodes and the data they process are generic, being the data fusion engineer the responsible for implementing the actual data fusion algorithms and defining the interest pieces of data to be interchanged. This architecture has been successfully used for several real projects, such as a simulator of multiradar multitarget tracking systems, the optimization of monoradar filters, an image based tracking system, and a generic real time data fusion system for Airport surface surveillance. In the paper both the overall architecture and some of these examples are described.