Multisource Information Fusion For CriticalInfrastructure Situation Awareness

Protection of critical infrastructures requires understanding the state or situation of physical infrastructure components as well as monitoring the cyber domain and the human landscape. Achieving this situation awareness involves fusion of heterogeneous information from physical sensors as well as information from human observers. Historically, the information fusion problem evolved from traditional areas such as military situation assessment. These applications involved processing sensor data using a variety of techniques, ranging from signal and image processing to pattern recognition, state estimation and automated reasoning. Recently, four new trends have emerged: (1) rapid spread of cell phones and associated global communications that enable humans to act as ad hoc observers, (2) interest in observing and characterizing the human landscape as well as the physical landscape, (3) advances in human– computer interactions which facilitate human participation in the fusion and reasoning process and (4) collaborative tools which support distributed team decision-making and analysis. This chapter introduces the concept of information fusion, describes recent trends and discusses its application to critical infrastructure security.