Abstract
DRDC Valcartier and MDA have created an advanced simulation testbed for the purpose of evaluating the effectiveness
of Network Enabled Operations in a Coastal Wide Area Surveillance situation, with algorithms provided by several
universities. This INFORM Lab testbed allows experimenting with high-level distributed information fusion, dynamic
resource management and configuration management, given multiple constraints on the resources and their
communications networks. This paper describes the architecture of INFORM Lab, the essential concepts of goals and
situation evidence, a selected set of algorithms for distributed information fusion and dynamic resource management, as
well as auto-configurable information fusion architectures. The testbed provides general services which include a multilayer
plug-and-play architecture, and a general multi-agent framework based on John Boyd's OODA loop. The testbed's
performance is demonstrated on 2 types of scenarios/vignettes for 1) cooperative search-and-rescue efforts, and 2) a noncooperative
smuggling scenario involving many target ships and various methods of deceit. For each mission, an
appropriate subset of Canadian airborne and naval platforms are dispatched to collect situation evidence, which is fused,
and then used to modify the platform trajectories for the most efficient collection of further situation evidence. These
platforms are fusion nodes which obey a Command and Control node hierarchy.
