Jens Happe

Testbed for distributed high-level information fusion and dynamic resource management

The testbed allows experimenting with highlevel distributed information fusion, dynamic resource management and configuration management given multiple constraints on the resources and their communication networks. The testbed provides general services that are useful for testing many information fusion applications. Services include a multi-layer plug-and-play architecture, and a general multi-agent framework based on John Boyds OODA loop.

A situation analysis toolbox: Application to coastal and offshore surveillance

In this paper, we present a toolbox to evaluate motion strategies in a realistic surveillance context for the purpose of enhancing decision support capabilities. Five components of the toolbox (Discretization, State Generation, State Searching, Behaviour Simulation and Visualization) implement the theoretical concepts put forward in previous works which outlined formal definitions of situation, situation awareness and situation analysis defined with the interpreted systems semantics.

Co-evolutionary search path planning under constrained information-sharing for a cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle team

Mobile cooperative sensor networks are increasingly used for surveillance and reconnaissance tasks to support domain picture compilation. However, efficient distributed information gathering such as target search by a team of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) remains very challenging in constrained environment. In this paper, we propose a new approach to learn resource-bounded multi-agent coordination for a multi-UAV target search problem subject to stringent communication bandwidth constraints in a dynamic uncertain environment. It relies on a new information-theoretic co-evolutionary algorithm to solve cooperative search path planning over receding horizons, providing agents with mutually adaptive and self-organizing behavior. The anytime coordination algorithm is coupled to a divergence-based information-sharing policy to exchange high-value world-state information under limited communication bandwidth. Computational results show the value of the proposed approach in comparison to a well-known reported technique.

A system for testing distributed information fusion applications for maritime surveillance

A PRECARN partnership project, called CanCoastWatch (CCW), is bringing together a team of researchers from industry, government, and academia for creating an advanced simulation test bed for the purpose of evaluating the effectiveness of Network Enabled Operations in a Coastal Wide Area Surveillance situation. The test bed allows experimenting with higher-level distributed information fusion, dynamic resource management and configuration management given multiple constraints on the resources and their communications networks. The test bed provides general services that are useful for testing many fusion applications. This includes a multi-layer plug-and-play architecture, and a general multi-agent framework based on John Boyds OODA loop.

INFORM Lab: a testbed for high-level information fusion and resource management

DRDC Valcartier and MDA have created an advanced simulation testbed for the purpose of evaluating the effectiveness of Network Enabled Operations in a Coastal Wide Area Surveillance situation, with algorithms provided by several universities. This INFORM Lab testbed allows experimenting with high-level distributed information fusion, dynamic resource management and configuration management, given multiple constraints on the resources and their communications networks. This paper describes the architecture of INFORM Lab, the essential concepts of goals and situation evidence, a selected set of algorithms for distributed information fusion and dynamic resource management, as well as auto-configurable information fusion architectures. The testbed provides general services which include a multilayer plug-and-play architecture, and a general multi-agent framework based on John Boyds OODA loop. The testbeds performance is demonstrated on 2 types of scenarios/vignettes for 1) cooperative search-and-rescue efforts, and 2) a noncooperative smuggling scenario involving many target ships and various methods of deceit. For each mission, an appropriate subset of Canadian airborne and naval platforms are dispatched to collect situation evidence, which is fused, and then used to modify the platform trajectories for the most efficient collection of further situation evidence. These platforms are fusion nodes which obey a Command and Control node hierarchy.