An architecture and a facility for the integration of all levels of data fusion

Data fusion is a key enabler for the situation analysis process. The study and the integration of all data fusion levels require both a suited architecture, and a modeling and simulation environment that allows the technological demonstration of the situation analysis concepts to be investigated, and also the demonstration of their supportive contribution to the situational awareness state. This paper discusses both of these aspects. In particular, it focuses on design issues related to development of a simulation environment for the analysis of the tactical situation. Finally, the paper describes a bootstrapping effort to develop a baseline of this environment. This baseline has been successfully used to support the analysis of threat evaluation algorithms for the command and control system of the IROQUOIS class ships.