Harbour Protection and Higher Level Fusion: Issues and Approaches

Harbour security is a strategic area of concern for the international community since ports and approaches to them are very important for the national and world economy. Reducing port vulnerabilities requires increased situation awareness, which can be achieved by utilizing higher-level fusion processes (situation assessment and impact prediction). The result of higher-level fusion is a coherent composite picture of the current and projected situations, which provides decision makers with essential information to help them understand and control the situation, and act effectively to mitigate its impact. Higher-level fusion processes utilize fused sensor data, intelligence information, databases, maps, information on prior similar situations, preliminary assessment of the vulnerability of the area under consideration, and intent and capability of a possible adversary. The purpose of this paper is to discuss major challenges, specific requirements, and approaches to designing higher level fusion processes as applied to the problem of harbour security.

[1]  J.F.A.K. van Benthem,et al.  Logic and Scientific Methods , 1997 .

[2]  P. Thagard,et al.  Abductive Reasoning: Logic, Visual Thinking, and Coherence , 1997 .

[3]  Ann M. Bisantz,et al.  On the Integration of Cognitive Work Analysis within a Multisource Information Fusion Development Methodology , 2004 .

[4]  E.G. Little,et al.  Ontology meta-model for building a situational picture of catastrophic events , 2005, 2005 7th International Conference on Information Fusion.

[5]  Alan N. Steinberg,et al.  Revisions to the JDL data fusion model , 1999, Defense, Security, and Sensing.

[6]  Pierre Valin,et al.  Data Fusion for Situation Monitoring, Incident Detection, Alert and Response Management , 2005 .

[7]  Dov M. Gabbay,et al.  Handbook of defeasible reasoning and uncertainty management systems: volume 2: reasoning with actual and potential contradictions , 1998 .

[8]  G. Harman.  The Inference to the Best Explanation , 1965 .

[9]  Rolf Haenni,et al.  Probabilistic Argumentation Systems , 2003 .

[10]  Galina L. Rogova,et al.  An Ontological Analysis of Threat and Vulnerability , 2006, 2006 9th International Conference on Information Fusion.

[11]  A. Steinberg,et al.  An approach to threat assessment , 2005, 2005 7th International Conference on Information Fusion.

[12]  Jens Rasmussen,et al.  Cognitive Systems Engineering , 2022 .

[13]  Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran,et al.  The Ontology of Tasks and Methods , 1997 .

[14]  Peter D. Scott,et al.  Reasoning about situations in the early post-disaster response environment , 2006, 2006 9th International Conference on Information Fusion.