Systems engineering for information fusion: Towards enterprise multi-level fusion integration

Advances in both low-level and high-level fusion continue to be made at an increasingly accelerated pace. With the value of Information Fusion now being recognized as applicable to several domain problems, comes the need to develop a systematic and cohesive approach to address the Enterprise Multi-Level Fusion Lifecycle. It is no longer sufficient to advance fragmented capabilities without formal processes with which to deploy them in an integrated fashion. While the importance of Systems Engineering has been previously addressed by the Fusion Community of Interest, advances in technology and in the way that systems are deployed, e.g., Service Oriented Architecture, Distributed Systems, Information Assurance, and Real-Time/Mobile applications, and especially the complexity of Systems-of-Systems which characterize Multi-Level Fusion, warrant a fresh look at developing a lock-step approach. This paper draws from real-world projects and explores how Systems Engineering can be leveraged to deploy Enterprise Multi-Level Fusion applications and bridge the integration gap between Lower-Level and Higher-Level capabilities that continues to challenge the Fusion community.