A practical method of situation assessment based on MAS

Situation assessment (SA) is one of the most important processes in the military decision. As a component of battlefield data fusion and decision support, SA is not easy to be realized ideally by using one particular technology in practice. Like any other complex military process, it requires the cooperation of lots of information processing technology. In this paper, we present a framework of SA-agent (situation assessment agent) to integrate different technology in order to get a practical way of SA, since multiagents system (MAS) is considered a useful method to model the complex command and control (C/sup 2/) system. SA-agent is an intelligent program that takes the task of situation assessment. The structure of SA-agent has three main components namely computation, reasoning and communication. We design these three components in detail by integrating series of new and useful technology. The computation component calculates the battlefield initiative; the reasoning component makes the situation prediction; and the communication component gives a help to interchange situation information among the SA-agents. This model can integrate qualitative reasoning, quantitative computing and multisource communicating as a whole, and give the result of situation assessment and the risk value to take it, which is very useful in the C/sup 2/ system simulation. Although this model may not simulate all the characteristics of SA, it really has the estimable advantage of practicality and facileness.