Many modern day collaborative systems/system of systems rely heavily on the sharing of information in order to improve performance, manage resources, and maximize overall capability. These types of systems are characterized by many decentralized nodes that can either all be identical or partitioned into a finite set of specialized types. When information is shared within any system of systems, the overall performance hinges on its ability to correctly associate the information received. The primary hypothesis evaluated by any system of systems after the receipt of new information is to determine whether this information belongs to a previously observed entity, or not. When this hypothesis is false, the new information belongs to a new entity, which includes both real and false entities. To evaluate this hypothesis, and to determine the optimal assignments to make at each time step, a data association discriminator or scoring function that performs like a distance function between two probability distribut...