Distributed Multi-Layer Data Fusion

Over the last decade developments in ASW sensor systems has greatly increased the number and quality of the sensor systems deployed thus increasing the volume of data to be assessed by orders of magnitude. Data fusion concepts have been employed to help reduce the operator workload and provide decision support tools. These data fusion capabilities have focused on organic sensor track and feature detection data (acoustic and non-acoustic) for situation awareness at the platform-level. As the Navy moves forward with plans to augment the conventional assets with unmanned sensors vehicles, standoff weapons, and intelligent command and control (C2) systems we find more data will be available from these remote assets that is needed to maintain an accurate, complete, and consistent Common Tactical Picture (CTP). To enable the development of this CTP in scalable fashion, a new USW Composite Tracking architecture is needed. This new architecture must clearly define the functional services, their processing, and services interactions that must be performed in order to integration data into the CTP. With an initial architecture defined in Phase I of this SBIR, the emphasis of the Phase II work is to implement, integrate, and demonstrate this new architecture and its ability to enable CTP formulation using multi-layer information sources from the tactical and operational domains.