TACTICS: Toolset for Acquiring Critical Tactical Information from C4I Systems

The growing digitization of the battlefield gives the commander an opportunity to access large amounts of information, but only a portion of this may be important at any one time in answering his Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs). PIRs are critical to the commander for making tactical decisions to accomplish the mission and each PIR necessitates identifying relevant tactical information from available intelligence sources during the course of the battle. We propose to address this by prototyping a Toolset for Acquiring Critical Tactical Information from C4I Systems (TACTICS). The TACTICS architecture will provide: 1) a graphical user interface for constructing a belief network for each PIR representing the causal relationship between significant battlefield events and possible answers to the PIR; 2) a network speculative analysis and evidence propagation capability to determine what information is critical to answer the PIR; and 3) an information filtering and retrieval mechanism to discard irrelevant information received by the commander and to acquire critical information from available C4I systems such as ASAS and MCS; filtered and retrieved information is then propagated through the network to obtain an answer to the PIR. Tactics will be validated in an appropriate battlefield scenario context.