Australian-developed technology will give defence personnel an improved view of battlespace information after it was integrated with a Raytheon Technologies product in Australia for the first time outside the United States. Raytheon Australia has partnered with Australian company Agent Oriented Software Pty Ltd (AOS), specialists in artificial intelligence and robotics, to integrate their newly developed product Intelligent Battlespace Advisor (IBA) with the Raytheon Solipsys’ in-service Battlespace Command and Control Centre (BC3) as part of the Raytheon Missiles & Defense command and control portfolio.
This is the first time that a commercially developed third-party product has been successfully integrated with BC3 outside the United States. The capability of BC3 will be increased by the new technology, providing Air Battle Managers with more comprehensive and accurate information. IBA has been developed to provide time-critical information to Air Battle Managers about unusual airspace activity, enabling accelerated and informed decision making. IBA’s Intelligent Software Agents are able to continually monitor all tracks in the Asia-Pacific airspace to classify them as routine or flag them for further investigation by an Air Battle Manager. BC3 has been in operation by the US Air Force since 2008 and aids complex airspace management by use of an advanced track fusion engine, multi-source correlator and tactical visualisation framework.
Raytheon Australia Managing Director Michael Ward said the integration of these technologies demonstrates the calibre of Australia’s defence industry in sovereign complex systems integration, and that the combined effect of the two systems will assist Air Battle Managers to rapidly achieve decision superiority. “Raytheon Australia has worked with AOS over the last year to successfully integrate IBA into Raytheon Missiles & Defense’s Solipsys BC3,” Ward said. “Not only have we achieved this integration with BC3 for the first time outside the United States, but we have achieved it using Australian technology and Australian engineers,” he said. “This collaboration with AOS has allowed the integration and development of a new and never seen before capability for Air Battle Managers.
“The benefit of integrating these two systems enables a decision superiority for Air Battle Managers and they can now receive accurate information quickly and act on that information appropriately,” Ward said.
AOS Managing Director Dr. Andrew Lucas said IBA is a software application designed as an intelligent assistant for surveillance operators and intelligence analysts to identify potential targets more effectively in a congested and complex battlespace. “IBA allocates an Intelligent Software Agent to each track to ‘reason’ with the available data. If this track is of concern, the IBA Agent alerts the Air Battle Manager and provides timely advice on why it is of concern,” Lucas said. “As an example, if an aircraft identifying as a civilian flight is well ahead of schedule, then the IBA Agent assigned to that track tries to determine why,” he said. “If the agent determines a potential threat, the Air Battle Manager is alerted. This is critical information to have at hand because identifying and clarifying unusual activity quickly allows Air Battle Managers to focus on tracks that may pose a real threat,” he said.
The success of integrating IBA with BC3 will now proceed to applying this new capability in the field, and potential export opportunities to other countries already using BC3.
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