AGENT APPROACH TO SITUATION ASSESSMENT

The Situation Assessment process is evolving from signal-analysis based centralized models to high-level reasoning based net-centric models, according to new paradigms of information fusion proposed by recent research. In this paper we propose a knowledge-based approach to Situation Assessment, and we apply it to maritime surveillance. A symbolic model of the world is given to an agent based framework, that use Description Logics based automatic reasoning to devise on estimate of the situation. The described approach potentially allows distributed Situation Assessment through agent collaboration. The goal is to support the understanding of the situation by relying on automatic interpretation processes, in order to provide the human operators with a synthetic vision, pointing out which are the elements on the scenario that require human intervention. The success of high level reasoning techniques is shown through experiments in a real maritime scenario, in which our approach is compared to the performances of human operators which monitor the situation without any support of an automatic reasoning system.