Page 27 - Australian Defence Magazine Feb-Mar 2023

FEBRUARY-MARCH 2023 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
DEFENCE BUSINESS AIR 6500 27
LEFT: Air Battle Managers at No.114 Mobile Control and Reporting Unit during Exercise Diamond Storm 2017
INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE AGENT
C-BDI underpins the Intelligent Battlespace Advisor (IBA), one of the principal decision assistants that provide the “in- telligence” in NGA’s JABMS. IBA combines data streams from a multitude of networked sensors across all warfight- ing domains and uses this information to assess the behav- iour of each and every airborne or maritime track.
“With an ‘agent for every track’, analogous to having one person for each, IBA identifies suspicious track behaviour and then highlights these occurrences to the Air Battle Man- agers,” Dr Andrew Lucas, AOS Managing Director, said.
“Now if we only use a pattern matching system, a flight that is running half an hour early would likely get flagged as a positive alert,” Lucas explained. “But because we in- gest a range of data streams from Air Services, we’re able to obtain ground and air speeds from civil aircraft and incor- porate this information into our calculations.
“This provides a dynamic wind model, which tells us that the reason why a flight is ahead of its flight plan is due to a 100-knot tailwind, and so this track does not pose a threat.
As these types of scenarios occur regularly, the IBA system can significantly reduce the number of false positives, leav- ing Air Battle Managers more time to focus on those tracks that represent actual threats.”
BUILDING TRUST
IN THE SYSTEM
A significant concern, however, is fos-
tering trust. One operator, relating
their experience with computer-based SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE decision-support systems, reportedly re-
marked: “We have had experience with
these systems – they generate nuisance
alerts, and we can’t switch them off!”
Recognising this, AOS has sought TIME TO FOCUS ON THOSE
to build a high degree of transparency and explainability into the decision- making processes that provide the alerts in IBA.
TRACKS THAT REPRESENT ACTUAL THREATS”
“THE IBA SYSTEM CAN
THE NUMBER OF FALSE POSITIVES, LEAVING AIR BATTLE MANAGERS MORE
“What we want is to be able to show
the reasoning,” Lucas said. “So, when the question is asked, why didn’t the system flag that track with the early running time? IBA can report that there was a 100-knot tailwind, and consequently the plane was 30 minutes ahead of its flight plan.”
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