Towards middleware based situation awareness

Potential solution to some problems related to forming, updating, and personalized distribution of company's level local operational picture (LOP) is suggested. Sensor networks, information collected by UAV-s and UGV-s, observations from reconnaissance parties, larger scale COP that sporadically become available are considered as sources of information. At the company's level LOP has to be made available in a personalized form to any member (including autonomous devices) of the company. The paper elaborates on the two incompletely resolved items: (1) Dynamic (semantic, temporal, and spatial) consistency check of information acquired from the multiple sources (2) Distribution of personalized situational information (LOP) - harmonized with individual access rights, processing power, interest points, available communication resource, etc. - to company's members. The ability for on-line consistency check of acquired information is dependent on tags for determining the position of sensors, time of the readings, and other situation-dependent validity constraints. This additional information is required to enable the use of underlying model of interaction-centered computation that applies the concept of mediated interactions. Questions of information consistency check, personalizing the company-level LOP, and distributing the information to company's members is assigned to the middleware. The role of universal communication interface performs interactive multiagent-based digital map system that implements a set of mediated interactions, stores the verified LOP information, and remembers processing capabilities, and positions of every platoon member. Each member of the company or platoon subscribes to its own slice of that information; the middleware prepares personalized copies and transmits periodically or on request. A prototype of such interfacing system has been implemented and tested in several projects already.