The State of the
Art and the State of the Practice: Transferring Insights from Complex Biological Systems to the Exploitation of
Netted Sensors in Command and Control Enterprises
January 2006
Jennifer Mathieu, The MITRE Corporation
Grace Hwang, The MITRE Corporation
James Dunyak, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
Exploiting data from a network of sensors (netted sensors) is an Enterprise
System Engineering challenge. Successfully meeting this challenge will
contribute significantly to improving the agility of today's Command
and Control (C2) Enterprise by achieving its goal of decision superiority
through better situational awareness. There is a pressing need to design
fusion algorithms that combine data from heterogeneous sensors, with
the goal of identifying well-defined Force Protection and Border Security
threats. Data fusion for netted sensors requires sensor-to-sensor communication,
as well as communication tipping points between the netted sensors and
the C2 Enterprise. Solutions are needed that fluidly respond to this
multi-scale challenge. Quorum sensing or cell-to-cell "communication"
in microbial populations has shown that bacteria can indeed act as a
collective rather than only as individuals (Taga and Bassler, 2003).
Analogously, an Enterprise has both individual and collective behavior.
Decisions that are made at the collective scale (e.g. force) rely on
information that is obtained at the individual scale (e.g. unit); this
information must be communicated effectively. In this paper, insight
gained from the mechanism used in a robust, adaptable biological system
is applied to the technical challenge of data fusion for netted sensors.
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