Fusion-based knowledge logistics for intelligent decision support in network-centric environment

Abstract

An efficient knowledge sharing between multiple participating parties is required to provide for situation awareness and consequently to manage any networked organization. Thereby, it is necessary that the right knowledge from distributed sources is integrated and transferred to the right person within the right context at the right time to the right purpose. The aggregate of these interrelated activities is referred to as knowledge logistics (KL). The paper presents an approach that implements KL for an intelligent decision support. The approach assumes an ontological knowledge representation model based on the paradigm of object-oriented constraint networks. This makes it possible to perform problem solving by directly extracting slices of the common ontology and putting them into constraint solvers such as ILOG. Humanitarian relief operations are considered here as one of the approach applications what is illustrated via a case study of on-the-fly portable hospital configuration.

Keywords:

• Knowledge logistics
• Intelligent decision-making support
• Network-centric environment
• Information fusion
• Object-oriented constraint networks

Acknowledgements

The paper is due to the research carried out as a part of Partner Project #1993P funded by EOARD of the USAF, the CRDF partner project with US ONR and US AFRL, project #16.2.44 of the research program “Mathematical Modelling and Intelligent Systems”, the project #1.9 of the research program “Fundamental Basics of Information Technologies and Computer Systems” of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the project funded by grant #02-01-00284 of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.