EdgeWare: Evolving ISR Applications for the Warfighter

Management Sciences"EdgeWare is motivated by the needs of warfighters to understand and negotiate the complex environments in which they are deployed. EdgeWare is an Edge Enabled System (EES) framework that will leverage and enhance the situation awareness (SA) of dismounted warfighters. Using EdgeWare, warfighters will develop, extend and combine ISR applications for their current mission. Situation understanding and response time will improve through sensing and reasoning applications that evolve out of the common needs of individual soldiers. In addition to improving access to information for the dismounted soldier, our approach to EES will increase the relevance of incoming information by allowing soldiers to customize how the information is acquired, processed, and interpreted. Finally, commanders will order customized information reports from dismounted warfighters as situations develop. In this way, warfighters will act as human sensors and interpreters of the environment in which they are deployed. A full-featured EdgeWare system will enable warfighters to create information harnessing and reasoning apps, called mission specific apps, during mission planning. These can then be configured for specific and novel situations by the dismounted warfighter using a mobile device while deployed. Phase II EdgeWare demonstrations will include applications for Force Protection and telemedicine.