Tina Erlandsson

Information fusion supporting team situation awareness for future fighting aircraft

In the military aviation domain, the decision maker, i.e. the pilot, often has to process huge amounts of information in order to make correct decisions. This is further aggravated by factors such as time-pressure, high workload and the presence of uncertain information. A support system that aids the pilot to achieve his/her goals has long been considered vital for performance progress in military aviation. Research programs within the domain have studied such support systems, though focus has not been on team collaboration. Based on identified challenges of assessing team situation awareness we suggest an approach to future military aviation support systems based on information fusion. In contrast to most previous work in this area, focus is on supporting team situation awareness, including team threat evaluation. To deal with these challenges, we propose the development of a situational adapting system, which presents information and recommendations based on the current situation.

Automatic evaluation of air mission routes with respect to combat survival

Abstract Aircraft flying in hostile environments are exposed to ground-based air defense systems. It is not always possible to both accomplish the mission and fly outside the range of the enemy’s weapon systems, especially if the positions of the enemy’s systems are not perfectly known. Automatic evaluation of mission routes from a combat survival perspective could therefore aid the pilots to plan their missions. When updated information regarding the positions and capabilities of the enemy’s systems is received during flight, the route could be re-evaluated and the mission could be re-planed or aborted if it is assessed to be too dangerous. The survivability model presented here describes the relation between the aircraft and the enemy’s defense systems. It calculates the probabilities that the aircraft is in certain modes along the route, e.g., undetected, tracked or hit. Contrary to previous work, the model is able to capture that the enemy’s systems can communicate and that the enemy must track the aircraft before firing a weapon. The survivability model is used to calculate an expected cost for the mission route. The expected cost has the attractive properties of summarizing the route into a single value and is able to take the pilot’s risk attitude for the mission into account. The evaluation of the route is influenced by uncertainty regarding the locations of the enemy’s sensors and weapons. Monte Carlo simulations are used to capture this uncertainty by calculating the mean and standard deviation for the expected cost. These two parameters give the pilots an assessment of the danger associated with the route as well as the reliability of this assessment. The paper concludes that evaluating routes with the survivability model and the expected cost could aid the pilots to plan and execute their missions.

A five states survivability model for missions with ground-to-air threats

Fighter pilots are exposed to the risk of getting hit by enemy fire when flying missions with ground-to-air threats. A tactical support system including a survivability model could aid the pilot to assess and handle this risk. The survivability model presented here is a Markov model with five states; Undetected, Detected, Tracked, Engaged and Hit. The output from the model is the probabilities that the aircraft is in these states during the mission. The enemys threat systems are represented with sensor and weapon areas and the transitions between the states depend on whether or not the aircraft is within any of these areas. Contrary to previous work, the model can capture the behaviors that the enemys sensor systems communicate and that the risk of getting hit depends on the enemys knowledge regarding the aircrafts kinematics. The paper includes a discussion regarding the interpretation of the states and the factors that influence the transitions between the states. Further developments are also identified for using the model to aid fighter pilots and operators of unmanned aerial vehicles with planning and evaluating missions as well as analyzing the situation during flight.

An air-to-ground combat survivability model

A survivability model can be a useful component of a tactical support system able to aid fighter pilots to assess the risk of getting hit by enemy fire from ground-based threats. This work identifies three desirable properties of such a model: it should allow for evaluating actions; it should enable domain experts to incorporate their knowledge; and it should represent uncertainties both regarding the locations of the threats as well as their future actions. A survivability model is suggested, which calculates the probability that the aircraft can fly a route unharmed and allows for routes of different lengths to be compared. A domain expert can describe the threats by specifying the risk of getting hit at a position of the route without having to consider the earlier actions of the aircraft and the threats. Three different threat models are suggested and compared. The influence of uncertainties regarding the positions of the threats is studied by calculating the probability density function for the survivability. Different representations that take into account both the uncertainty regarding the present and future situation are discussed. The results indicate that the suggested survivability model could be a useful component of a future tactical support system, even though some further development is needed.

Route planning for air missions in hostile environments

Air mission planning in hostile environments requires that multiple dependent objectives are taken into account. For example, the aircraft must be unharmed in order to perform reconnaissance in an area of interest. Moreover, the risk that the aircraft gets hit depends on the probability that the enemy’s sensors are tracking the aircraft. This paper suggests and analyses an expected cost model for mission routes. It is shown that only a few parameters need to be adjusted for combining different objectives, such as maximizing the survivability, maximizing the probability of performing mission task(s) and minimizing the time in air. The route planning problem is formulated as the optimization problem of finding the route with minimum expected cost. An implemented route planner utilizing particle swarm optimization is used for demonstrating the method with simulations. It is shown that the route planner is able to take dependencies between objectives into account. The conclusion is that the method is useful for planning air missions in hostile environments with multiple objectives.