Intelligence Exchange (IntellEx)

The networking of modern day systems and organizations have become more prevalent and necessary as the problems now focused upon by the Department of Defense have strongly shifted from massive force on force confrontations to small group asymmetric and guerilla tactics. Actionable information which would provide decision makers with the greatest knowledge gain is not geographically or organizationally centric. This poses a problem for current stovepipe systems in two respects. Firstly, centralized processing of the enormous amount of data which is being collected is not feasible because of communication and computational bandwidth restrictions. Secondly, these local processing systems do not share information, so events which are globally relevant and locally insignificant will never be accredited with the importance they deserve. This paper introduces Intelligence Exchange (IntellEx), a system supporting transparent information dissemination for knowledge gain in distributed fusion processes. The system, which is in its basic research phase, is being developed for the purposes of maritime domain awareness or MDA. This paper will show how the problem characteristics of MDA would benefit from a global sharing of intelligence and how the system architecture of IntellEx is being designed to accomplish these goals. The paper will detail how multiple distributed instances of fixed process expert systems such as Information Fusion Engine for Real-time Decision Making (INFERD) can exchange intelligence transparently with zero modification to the expert system itselfand little or no additional human modeling or input.