Intelligent decision aids for 21st C4I architectures

The US Army´s vision of its future communications architecture is the Warfighter Information Network (WIN) and Battlefield Information Transmission System (BITS). WIN and BITS represent a fundamental change in the Army´s view of its communication architecture: from voice dominated to information/data dominated. With the advent of these information dominated services, 21st century commanders will want to deploy automated decision aids that maximize their advantage in a conflict. To realize this capability, the commanders need customized services that are automatically derived from the existing battlefield automation systems (BAS) and non-BAS servers. We propose to provide these new customized and automated decision enabling services (intelligent decision aids (IDA)) by employing a new service and network control concept/architecture. Our architectural concept is based on separating the service control functions (processes for decision making, etc.) from basic resources provided by the existing network (mobile subscriber equipment (MSE), combat net radios, etc.), information servers and multimedia servers. These separate service control functions will be distributed between intermediate service control nodes (SCNs) attached to the network and service clients resident in commanders´ multimedia terminals. The SCN acts as a network-based intelligent agent (IA) that has access to existing network resources and information servers and performs customized service control functions on behalf of the user to derive customized services for the user. The SCN is a new network element located between existing information servers and commanders´ multimedia terminals. This architecture enables a commander to obtain timely battlefield information tailored to his needs. This innovative approach will reduce the data traffic by concentrating and fusing traffic from multiple servers within the network, and distributing the fused data to the multimedia terminals