The aim of this project is to perform the formative research required to construct a reactive decentralised data fusion system and to demonstrate its value in industrially relevant applications. Such a system must fuse information from disparate and varied sources, whilst coping with unreliable data and limited communication bandwidth, in a time critical environment.
The core of the project concerns the integration of agent technologies and Bayesian statistical methods, and we are working on this aspect with academic partners at Oxford University. We are specifically interested in designing the mechanisms by which self interested agents will trade for information, computation resources and bandwidth. The goal of this work is to ensure that the self-interested actions of the individual agents results in desirable system-wide properties.
The project involves three industrial partners, each of whom is providing a distinct application area - BAE SYSTEMS, Rolls-Royce and QinetiQ. The project is a Defence Aerospace and Research Partnerships (DARP) project, with joint funding from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).