New Challenges for Defining Information Fusion Requirements

Abstract

The changing geopolitical landscape in the world has been and will continue to be the driving framework within which requirements for new and adaptable capabilities in Information Fusion (IF) technology are defined. For major nation-states of the world, this changing landscape will, it is argued, generate new challenges that significantly broaden both the range and adaptive nature of the capability that future IF systems must have. Another dramatically changing landscape is that of information networking, and the integration and exploitation of such networking in military and defense operations have led to transformations in military thinking and culture, even to the consideration of radically new socio-organizational dynamics for Command and Control (C2). Further, the need to develop deeper insights into agile and creative adversarial behaviors imparts what is called here the need for a “multi-perspective” Information Fusion process that will require new ways to think about exploiting both traditional and novel Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) sources. Further, there is the impact of informational dimensionality via the need, similarly motivated, to fuse and exploit the “PMESII” (Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure, Information) spectrum of information. Lastly, there is the desire on the part of the military to focus on “Effects-based” operations; here too there is an impact of new requirements onto the Data Fusion process.

These extensive changes in both the application context and the technological foundations for IF have far-reaching implications for the both the architectural design of IF processes as well as the foundational algorithms employed in IF systems. Significant challenges exist toward achieving robustness and scalability of IF capabilities, the role of and support to human involvement on the IF process, and the ability of IF systems to estimate not only states in the physical domain but also in the informational and cognitive domains. This paper and presentation will survey this extensive new and changing landscape as regards the impacts on IF requirements, with some thoughts on new strategies for IF process design.