Cooperative situation assessment in a maritime scenario

In large‐scale, complex domains such as space defense and security systems, situation assessment and decision making are evolving from centralized models to high‐level, net‐centric models. In this context, collaboration among the many actors involved in the situation assessment process is critical to achieve a prompt reaction as needed in the operational scenario. In this paper, we propose a multiagent‐based approach to situation assessment, where agents cooperate by sharing local information to reach a common and coherent assessment of situations. Specifically, we characterize situation assessment as a classification process based on OWL ontology reasoning, and we provide a protocol for cooperative multiagent situation assessment, which allows the agents to achieve coherent high‐level conclusions. We validate our approach in a real maritime surveillance scenario, where our prototype system effectively supports the user in detecting and classifying potential threats; moreover, our distributed solution performs comparably to a centralized method, while preserving independence of decision makers and dramatically reducing the amount of communication required. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.