Multi-source integration and temporal situation assessment in air combat

Increasing threat-system performance together with enhanced sensor coverage dictate an increased battlefield area. The performance of threat-systems in terms of speed and distance are considered to be of more importance than their geographical site. The conventional approach to situation assessment in decision support systems found much on location and geographical data. In this paper an unconventional way to attack the threat assessment problem in the time domain is proposed. This approach is based on hostile object or agent action possibilities described as time intervals. The 3D spatial problem with threat locations, sensor coverage, escape ranges and other tactical decision criteria can be transformed into a temporal representation, where time points and time intervals for hostile threatening actions are calculated. The temporal representation of the problem then serve as a base for further processing, e.g. sensor management and temporal displays.