An approach to the design and development of a decentralized data fusion simulator: Battlefield and COMINT system simulator

Abstract

Multisensor data fusion is very important in the defence-oriented field. Data fusion can be used to integrate the individual sensor data into a common operational picture of the battlefield. A reliable forming of a common operational picture of the battlefield requires detecting, locating, identifying, classifying and monitoring dynamic entities such as radio-emitters, different platforms, weapons, and military units. In this paper, we present an approach to design and develop two simulators for a decentralized data fusion simulator - a battlefield simulator and a simulator for the communications intelligence (COMINT) system (only direction finders). Primarily, the battlefield simulator is described as a basic part for data fusion. We have developed a fully interactive, graphical user interface based scenario generation tool for creating battlefield scenarios. A target behavior is simulated in the battlefield scenario. The proposed simulator of the COMINT system generates position measurements based on the detection of electromagnetic radiation from targets. To generate position measurements, several factors such as sensitivity, observation error, target activity, methods for position determination were considered. Three methods for target position determination are implemented in the simulator. These methods are two-step positioning techniques (indirect techniques) based on the estimation of a specified parameter such as the angle of arrival (AOA).

Keywords

• simulator
• data fusion
• decision level
• sensor
• direction finder
• position determination
• simulation of battlefield