SITUATION UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGIES FOR HOMELAND SECURITY (SUTHS) Sergio Gigli

SITUATION UNDERSTANDING TECHNOLOGIES
FOR HOMELAND SECURITY (SUTHS)
Sergio Gigli
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories
3 Executive Campus
Cherry Hill, New Jersey 08002
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
The Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (LM ATL) has been researching and
developing state-of-the-art, multi-level data and information fusion technologies to provide
military commanders with comprehensive understanding of battlespace situations. LM ATL is
transitioning these situation understanding technologies to the homeland security domain to
provide homeland security analysts and decision makers with tools to more quickly and more
completely understand emerging terrorist threats to the homeland. The LM ATL situation
understanding technologies go beyond representing the physical location of threat units on a map
to predicting the intent of these threats and their most likely and most dangerous courses of
action given our vulnerabilities. Perspectives including threat behavior, capabilities, and
motivation contribute to this analysis.
At the core of the LM ATL situation understanding technologies is the Virtual Sector, a data
structure that can represent both detailed location and kinematics information collected on the
threat by contact sensors such as radar and electro-optics and text-based intelligence from
HUMINT, COMINT, and IMINT sources. The Virtual Sector is built using conceptual graphs
(closely related to semantic graphs). Conceptual graphs represent the evolving situation for
human analysts. The LM ATL situation understanding technologies include a range of services
that generate and maintain the nodes and relationships in the conceptual graphs. These situation
understanding services can significantly reduce the workload of homeland security analysts and
can generate additional hypotheses regarding the terrorist threat that analysts may not have yet
inferred.
SUTHS ARCHITECTURE
LM ATL has developed the Situation Understanding Technologies for Homeland Security
(SUTHS) architecture shown in Figure 1.
SUTHS is capable of processing data from three major sources, situation reports from first
responders, real-time streaming sensor data, and structures databases.
SUTHS accepts both unstructured, free-text situation reports as well as semantically marked-up
situation reports from first responders. The processing speed and accuracy of SUTHS is
Sensor Data Streams
Intelligent Data Retrieval
FBI
Cargo
Manifests
ONI
EO Image
Virtual Sector
Common Intelligence Picture
Semantically Marked-Up
SITREP
Building A
Operations/Intelligence Center
<3 barrels>
<leaking>
<highway 1>
Barrels
unloaded to
near
leaking
into
Eastern Star
Waterway
Semantically Marked-Up
ALERT
<critical alert>
maintain distance
await Hazmat
Dissemination Services
Common Operational Picture
User’s Context Analysis
A
B
Situation Understanding Services
Cargo
Analysis
Temperature
Event
Analysis
Wind
Patterns
Local
Equipment
Currents
Environment Models
Figure 1. SUTHS Architecture
significantly increased if the situation reports are semantically marked-up at their source. The
LM ATL WIRE capability for first responders (see “Capturing Critical Information using the
Wearable Intelligent Reporting Environment (WIRE),” Michael Orr, Helen Hastie, Dan Miksch,
Josh Flanders, and Celeste Corrado, R&D Partnerships in Homeland Security Proceedings,
Boston, MA, April 27-28 2005) ensures that situation reports are semantically marked-up at the
source and, thus, readily incorporated into SUTHS.
Real-time streaming sensor data from sources such as electro-optical/infra-red optical/infrared
sensors, LADAR, and GMTI/SAR radar provides SUTHS with contact reports for entities within
the operational Area of Interest (AoI). SUTHS uses LM ATL Level 1 Data Fusion technologies
to integrate these multiple sensor data streams into a series of entity tracks that are displayed to
operators in a Common Operational Picture (COP). The COP provides SUTHS operators,
working in the central Operations/Intelligence Center, with a picture of where their assets,
neutral civilian assets, and potential threats are located within the AoI.
SUTHS correlates, fuses, and integrates information from structured databases such as those at
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and at Office of Naval Intelligence. Information retrieval
from structured databases is driven by the development of situation understanding within
SUTHS. The retrieval process is intelligent in that it is guided by the specific information needs
determined by SUTHS to be present in the AoI.
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The data processed by SUTHS is stored within a data structure referred to as the Virtual Sector.
The Virtual Sector contains two interrelated, though traditionally separate, views of the AoI data,
the first a Common Intelligence Picture (CIP) and the second a COP. The CIP represents data
about the AoI in a node-and-arc representation, which is standard within the intelligence analysis
community. The nodes represent entities within the AoI, and the arcs represent relationships
between these entities. The entire CIP also has a temporal dimension. Nodes within the CIP can
be linked, if correlation is possible, to the tracks of the associated entities in the COP. In this
way, operators are able to view the real-time operational situation unfold against the backdrop of
the broader intelligence picture.
Situation understanding services provide a suite of analysis services that process data within the
Virtual Sector and access relevant a priori models, including models of the environment, to make
additional inferences about the situation within the AoI. These inferences are then represented as
additional arcs within the CIP and as symbols on the COP. For example, Cargo Analysis services
review shipping manifests and other logistics records to analyze the path taken by a particular
cargo. Local equipment services review the capabilities of first responders and their potential
ability to handle the current situation effectively. Designed to rapidly insert new situation
understanding services into the architecture, SUTHS provides additional inferences from new
analysis perspectives.
The final element of the SUTHS architecture is the Dissemination Services. SUTHS is
responsible for providing tailored, mission-relevant information to a range of users, including
first responders, command and control operators and intelligence analysts. Maintaining a context
for each of its end-users, SUTHS continuously updates the end-user’s context changes. Context
includes current position, current mission, health and status, and command echelon. SUTHS
reasons over an end-user’s context to determine which subset of inferred information within the
Virtual Sector should be disseminated and in what form. In our example, based on the automated
analysis of the situation in the AoI, SUTHS warns the first responders via an alert, LM ATL’s
WIRE converts to a spoken message, that they should hold their position and await arrival of a
HAZMAT team.
Providing end-to-end automated situation understanding capabilities for the homeland security
domain, SUTHS narrows the gap between the data and the command and control decisionmakers, thereby enabling faster and more effective response to critical, complex events.
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