Environment Perception Process in Maritime Command and Control

Various operational trends in naval warfare, such as technological advances in threat technology and an ongoing shift to littoral warfare, put the shipboard decision making process under pressure. Data must be processed under time-critical conditions and, as a consequence, the risk of saturation in building the tactical picture and of making the wrong decision increases. One must also realise that the human plays an essential role in the naval command and control cycle. Situation awareness is essential for commanders and their staff to conduct decision-making activities. Data Fusion is seen as an essential process to enable operators to achieve situation awareness. This paper discusses the environment perception process (EPP) as an important aspect of the problem of dynamic decision making in the context of naval command and control. The EPP is aimed at achieving the first level of situation awareness that forms the basis for the subsequent more abstract levels. The quality of the results of the EPP is of utmost importance for the situational awareness that can be achieved at the higher levels. This paper is a step towards the definition of an integrated architecture for data fusion giving emphasis to situation awareness in the context of dynamic human decision making. Such an integrated architecture facilitates the proper conceptualisation and design of decision support systems taking into account the human role in the command and control cycle.