Naval situational awareness for defence using multi-agent AI data fusion

The Challenge

Naval combat teams face overwhelming volumes of incoming information in contested maritime environments — radar tracks, satellite data, AIS transponder feeds — and cannot manually fuse, cross-check and assess it at the tempo modern engagements demand. Worse, adversaries actively attack the data itself through spoofing and adversarial-AI techniques, so operators need to know not just what the data says but whether it can be trusted.

The Solution

MAXAD (Multi Agent Exchange and Analysis of Data) is NquiringMinds’ “AI Ships” project: a cyber-resilient, multi-agent AI platform that exchanges and analyses data to support combat and maritime situational awareness. Working with BAE Systems as prime, NQM develops advanced analytics for BAE Systems’ combat system in the marine domain, augmenting the human decision process when large volumes of incoming information must be processed. The system fuses inputs from multiple sources — including radar, satellite data and the Automatic Identification System (AIS) used on ships — and makes recommendations on the trustworthiness of incoming data, dynamically adjusting as new information arrives. The underlying machine learning and algorithms were originally developed in NQM’s earlier cybersecurity work, demonstrating the transferability of its trusted-data technology into the defence domain.

Outcomes

The project has delivered a multi-agent analytics capability integrated against BAE Systems’ marine combat system, a live demonstrator at maxad.nqminds.com, and associated adversarial-AI resilience research, with follow-on exploitation through BAE INTeACT IAMD.