Fusion-based knowledge logistics for intelligent decision support in network-centric environment

An efficient knowledge sharing between multiple participating parties is required to provide for situation awareness and consequently to manage any networked organization. Thereby, it is necessary that the right knowledge from distributed sources is integrated and transferred to the right person within the right context at the right time to the right purpose. The aggregate of these interrelated activities is referred to as knowledge logistics (KL). The paper presents an approach that implements KL for an intelligent decision support. The approach assumes an ontological knowledge representation model based on the paradigm of object-oriented constraint networks. This makes it possible to perform problem solving by directly extracting slices of the common ontology and putting them into constraint solvers such as ILOG. Humanitarian relief operations are considered here as one of the approach applications which is illustrated via a case study of on-the-fly portable hospital configuration.