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C-E Solutions Successfully Demonstrates Airspace Battle Management Tactical Data MiningIn late February 2009, C-E Solutions was successful in winning a contract with Australian Defence's Rapid Prototyping, Development and Evaluation (RPDE) Program to demonstrate an Airspace Battle Management - Tactical Data Mining (ABM-TDM) Decision Support Tool. After just 7 weeks, C-E Solutions hosted relevant RPDE Task personnel and Defence task sponsors at C-E Solutions at Taylors Beach, and succeeded in demonstrating all elements of the tool required by Defence. The demonstration conducted was based on approximately 18 months of actual historical Australian air traffic data. It is believed that what C-E Solutions demonstrated is a world first, with comments from the Defence sponsor "this is at least two generations ahead of what we thought we wanted". Horus identifies patterns of airspace usage. The underlying problem presented an enormous technical challenge, made even more difficult by severe cost and schedule constraints imposed by Defence. Furthermore, whilst a previous project undertaken by RPDE and industry had shown that it might be possible to construct a system able to carry out air traffic pattern recognition and matching, the requirement to do this in real time had proven too difficult. By taking a highly innovative approach, applying ‘smart’ technologies and directing concurrent, collaborative development in conjunction with other high-performance SMEs, C-E Solutions was able to solve previously intractable problems. For example, in order to deliver the supercomputer-class performance required to analyse the data in real time, but within a personal computer-class budget, the solution's core processing node used a cluster of specially-configured Sony Playstation 3s. Extending the games console technology theme further, games development knowhow was also applied to the problem, especially given that the many of the underlying problems had strong parallels with technologies already deployed within team console games and console games delivering 3D playing environments. The resultant system, Horus, analyses air traffic radar and other sensor data to 'learn' the patterns of aircraft behaviour across very large volumes of airspace. Once 'trained' the system can automatically identify flights that exhibit unusual or suspicious behaviour (for example, the sort of unusual behaviour that presaged the “9/11” terrorist strikes) and provide an alert to air traffic, or air defence, operators. Please see the Horus product flyer for more information. Horus represents a product world first. The product incorporates a novel, extremely polished and highly usable user interface. Horus not only has immediate applications for Defence in a range of scenarios, but is already drawing interest from the Air Traffic Control community, both domestically and internationally. However, it’s application is not restricted to simply airspace data, but could easily be applied to maritime tracks of vessel movements as well, providing assistance for identification of activities such as illegal immigration and smuggling, supporting many levels of border protection. Its strength lies in processing large volumes of track data, so could also be applied to problems relating to traffic engineering, city planning, and identifying animal movement patterns (for example on large stations or for biological research). Document Actions |
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