Reasoning with conceptual graphs and evidential networks for multi-entity maritime threat assessment

Hybrid threat events are rare and cannot be modelled solely based on data. Instead they require a focus on discovery of emergent knowledge through information sharing across agencies and systems. That requires a shared conceptualisation of the problem and entities involved. It also means that uncertain and possibly conflicting information describing multiple entities and their relationships needs to be reasoned about. In this paper we discuss the relationship between uncertain conceptual graphs and belief functions. We put forward a fusion process which allows for taking advantage of evidential reasoning capabilities in a multi-entity context. We show how information from conceptual graphs can be fed into or represented as an evidential networks and how the inference results obtained from valuation networks can be used to generate a probability distribution on conceptual graphs. This is demonstrated on a multi-entity threat assessment situation where a hybrid threat is formed by several possibly cooperating vessels.