Information Integration for Situation Awareness

The Air Force Research Laboratory continues to investigate technologies for improved situational awareness (SA) by developing a testbed for evaluating SA concepts and capabilities. Information Integration for Situational Awareness (IISA) is a collaborative framework that allows distributed, disparate users and resources to create and share a common understanding of the battlespace. The foundation of this framework is a message-oriented middleware that serves as an information repository and provides publish and subscribe services to push information to clients that require it. IISA clients plug into the framework via interfaces defined by Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema, thus providing loose coupling and ease of integration. IISA envisions a wide variety of clients, both automated and user-based, to collect, refine, and distribute battlespace information. Clients connect realworld systems to IISA, including elements of command and control (C2) and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). IISA leverages modeling and simulation technologies to stimulate the testbed with synthetic battlefield information in the absence of realworld systems. The first phase of IISA development has been demonstrated in the context of an operations other than war (OOTW) scenario involving counter-insurgency operations in an urban setting. Key features of this phase of development include a flexible map viewer client and a simulation gateway. This baseline serves as a point of departure for continuing research in areas such as machine-to-machine process automation, adversarial modeling and prediction, and information distribution from unattended ground sensors (UGS). The ongoing development of IISA promises valuable lessons to support key initiatives such as predictive battlespace awareness and effects-based operations.