Towards middleware based situation awareness Leo Motus, Merik Meriste ja Jürgo-Sören Preden

Distributed teamwork difficulties The team comprises autonomously operating, and interacting mix of humans, computers and software-intensive artefacts Each member of the team may have its own environment, sub-goals, cognitive capabilities, and situations guiding their operation Information from the environment and about members’ state comes from different sources, and need not be consistent with the goals set for the team The problem – check the consistency of information, harmonise its interpretation, and achieve common understanding Situation awareness seminar, IOC Leo Motus 2

Example of a problem with mixed team UAV view Interface ??? Far –away HQ view Local HQ view Reconnaissance view Platoon view Smart sensors view Situation awareness seminar IOC Leo Motus

The idea for solving the problem UAV-s Far – away HQ Local HQ Reconnaissance Platoon Sensor Networks Interactive data exchange Situation awareness seminar IOC Middleware + digital map

Situations A situation is the aggregate of biological psychological, socio-cultural, and environmental factors acting on individual, or group of agents – and may condition their behavioural patterns Each autonomous agent may define its own situations – individual situation awareness In a team we need team situation awareness – a harmonised model for individual situation awarenesses and for joint decision-making process Team situation awareness results from the negotiation process Situation awareness seminar IOC 5

Steps in the negotiation process 1. Agree on the common ontology, information presentation form, data structures 2. Verify the exchanged messages 3. Fuse messages into more abstract messages, if necessary 4. Achieve common understanding of the actual state and course of actions– the team situation awareness 5. Achieve common agreement on actions taken 6. Coordinate, or synchronise, the actions 7. Collect and analyse the feedback from the actions – to improve the process Situation awareness seminar IOC 6

Fusing the situations Situation awareness seminar IOC 7

Middleware Situation awareness seminar IOC 8

Architecture of the middleware enables self-X communication (1) External (application oriented) services: verification and validation of messages and information transformation and compression into interim format keeping tracking of the position of agents and their access rights memorising and using the subscriptions and processing capabilities of agents delivering the subscribed information within the personalised constraints and restrictions Situation awareness seminar IOC 9

Architecture of the middleware enables self-X communication (2) Internal services, implemented by a multi-agent digital map system: handling the interim data format provide the base map for the required area estimate, maintain and update the position of application agents partition the map based on the subscription from the application agents, e.g. specific areas or layers, specific background information, specific formats, etc memorising interest points of subscribers Situation awareness seminar IOC 10

Conclusions Practical impact of mixed teams (humans, computers, software-intensive artefacts) on functioning of our society increases rapidly. Formally such teams can be modelled as proactive, ad hoc, and mobile networks that integrate networks of proactive pervasive computing systems, mobile, proactive smart artefacts, and elements of social networks. The suggested middleware for such networks requires several innovative research results, e.g. Super-Turing models of computation Verification methods for networked systems Situation awareness seminar IOC 11