Theater-wide reference information management

Future military operational concepts emphasize the use of multi-platform operations and the sharing of resources within the theater of operations. This capability allows more users access to data from expensive resources. However, before concepts for sharing such resources reach their full potential, several technical issues must be resolved. Of particular interest in this paper are issues related to the processing and sharing of reference systems information, Reference systems information may include position, velocity, attitude, and pointing information from, to, and regarding the ownship, other friendlies, enemy operations, and targets as well as the quality of those parameters. The Reference Systems Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate has conceived a family of programs to address technical issues associated with the fusion and sharing of reference system information. The cornerstone program of this family, called Theater-wide Reference Information Management(TRIM, (1996)), is addressing some of these issues from the perspective of a combat aircraft in an operational theater that includes other airborne and ground based resources. This paper addresses some of the initial TRIM work and describes reference systems issues related to multi-platform data fusion.