A component-based simulator for supporting research on situation recognition

Research on information fusion and situation management within the military domain, is often focused on data-driven approaches for aiding decision makers in achieving situation awareness. We have in a companion paper identified situation recognition as an important topic for further studies on knowledge-driven approaches. When developing new algorithms it is of utmost importance to have data for studying the problem at hand (as well as for evaluation purposes). This often become a problem within the military domain as there is a high level of secrecy, resulting in a lack of data, and instead one often needs to resort to artificial data. Many tools and simulation environments can be used for constructing scenarios in virtual worlds. Most of these are however data-centered, that is, their purpose is to simulate the real-world as accurately as possible, in contrast to simulating complex scenarios. In high-level information fusion we can however often assume that lower-level problems have already been solved - thus the separation of abstraction - and we should instead focus on solving problems concerning complex relationships, i.e. situations and threats. In this paper we discuss requirements that research on situation recognition puts on simulation tools. Based on these requirements we present a component-based simulator for quickly adapting the simulation environment to the needs of the research problem at hand. This is achieved by defining new components that define behaviors of entities in the simulated world.