The systems integration of autonomous behavior analysis to create a "Maritime Smart Environment" for the enhancement of maritime domain awareness

• Main Author: Davis, Cledo L.
• Other Authors: Goshorn, Rachel
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/5352

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited === Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is a very challenging mission area in an ever-increasing net-centric environment, which is inundated with data from many highly advanced, capable sensors and communication suites. With all these technological data collection and dissemination advances, the information available is just too voluminous for humans alone to process and react to manually, sifting the "wheat from the chaff," and be expected to accomplish effective operational decision making regarding maritime threats to national security, as well as to international peace and trade on the high seas. This thesis addresses MDA Joint Integrating Concept capability gaps, MDA-003C and MDA-004C, for aggregating, analyzing and displaying maritime information in order to understand the maritime environment to identify threats and predicting activity within the maritime domain. Applying the Systems Engineering process, the concept, requirements analysis, architectures, and system design and validation description for a systems integration solution is presented. The proposed implementation entails integrating autonomous behavior analysis capability that utilizes syntactical grammar-based spatial-temporal behavior classifications within existing Net-Centric MDA environments. In attestation to this implementation, this thesis describes the research conducted on a demonstrable proof-of-concept laboratory system, the Watchman Maritime Smart Environment System, whose representative architecture for specific autonomous behavior analysis implementation is provided.