Situation tracking: The Concept and a Scenario

Situation awareness makes a step forward from the previous focus on Level 1 information processing and fusion, as defined by the JDL model. However, in most approaches the meaning of dasiasituation awarenesspsila is limited to knowing whether a particular relation holds or not. In our approach, situations are considered as entities that can affect, exhibit and participate in various behaviors. This requires a clear understanding of the meaning of a new concept - dasiabehavioral situationpsila. We use the term dasiasituational behaviorpsila to refer to a collective response to an event generated by a collection of objects in a situation. This in turn leads to the notion of dasiabehavioral situation modelingpsila that refers to the activity of modeling situational behaviors. In this paper we show an ontology that can be used to capture abstract behaviors. This ontology is an extension of the ontology for situation awareness. Here behavioral situations are considered as dynamic entities having states, with transitions from one state to another resulting from events generated by entities participating in a specific behavior, and thus can be tracked. In this paper we discuss a scenario that will show examples of dasiasituational statespsila as well as dasiaeventspsila. The whole scenario is embedded in the formalism of state machines, where particular states are modeled as dasiasituation typespsila. All models are expressed in terms of an ontology for situational behaviors.