An object oriented development suite for data fusion: Design, generation, simulation and testing

An new object oriented development suite for data fusion is presented. It is shown how the various issues in the data fusion development like design, implementation, simulation and testing are realised and automated by this development suite. This allows the realisation of high sophisticated data fusion systems as applied in numerous civil and defence areas, like air traffic or satellite orbit control, coastal surveillance, air defence systems or more generally combat or battle management systems. The approach supports the design of multi layer data fusion systems with centralised, decentralised or hybrid architecture integrating numerous different information sources. Besides of the generation of an object oriented data fusion kernel the developer is also supported in rapid prototyping just at the beginning of the developing process. Further the final software and system testing and verification within a simulated and real environment is taken into account. Functionally, the data fusion development described in this paper includes the tracking, classification and identification topic. This enables a complete data fusion development in accordance with different industry or governmental standards.