Applications

Human Behaviour Representation

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:54:39 +1100

In most current synthetic environments, the individual entities in the simulation will execute the same task in the same way, ignoring differences between individuals, and even the variability of a given individual over time. In the real world, this is not the case. The choice of strategies and the ordering of sub-strategies will vary across individuals and will vary for a given individual across time. When such variance is not included in a model, it makes adversaries, allies, and neutral personnel too predictable because they will always do the same thing at the same time in the same way. Recent thinking recognizes the inherent variability of humans (i.e. differences in cognition and physiology from one individual to the next), and the necessity of modelling this to improve the realism of synthetic forces.

The Improved Human Behaviour Representation (IHBR) project (UK Ministry of Defence) addresses this shortcoming. Using CoJACK™, realistic human variation is generated in a psychologically-grounded and therefore principled manner. This is a major step forward relative to the ad hoc approaches of the past. CoJACK predicts variation in decision-making time as well as errors that can occur due to moderating factors (e.g. fatigue). Situation awareness is also explicitly represented and logged, allowing analysis of the extent to which unexpected behaviour resulted from deficiencies in situation awareness.

Oil Trading and Operations

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:46:31 +1100

Norwegian-based Statoil, one of the world’s largest suppliers of crude oil and natural gas, has developed software to support oil trading and operations management, using JACK.

Intelligent agents are applied to help solve optimisation, planning and process control issues in Statoil's trading and operations areas. Among the expected benefits in the trading area is the timely provision of the most up-to-date information, enabling the company to rapidly respond to changes in the market. This speed of operation allows Statoil to improve effectiveness and continually modify ongoing business tactics, giving the company ample opportunity to further maximise revenues, while reducing the number of decisions made on out-dated information.

Statoil chose JACK as its development platform because of AOS’s field-proven track record in knowledge engineering applications, its extensive training and mentoring services, and the availability of valuable support from Cambridge Consultants.

"To prosper in many of today’s global markets companies need to gather and act on only the latest information. By integrating agent technology into their system, Statoil can focus on running its business, safe in the knowledge that these programs are gathering business-critical data all the time", says Cambridge Consultants' Grant Garner.

Rules of Engagement

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:39:11 +1100

The ROE3 application (Rules of Engagement Evaluation Environment) adds sophisticated modelling of ROE (Rules of Engagement) to simulation environments. In the past, the modeling of ROE in a simulation context has been fairly rudimentary (e.g., setting fire permissions and target priorities in the OneSAF Testbed Baseline).

A key problem in modelling how military personnel behave during a conflict is to understand how ROE are interpreted with respect to the tactical environment and mission goals to be achieved. Until ROE3, the following factors were not modelled:

ROE,
how a person selects a tactic within the scope of several ROE being applied simultaneously, and
how this selection process is affected by the type of operation, psychological aspects of the person, and moderating influences experienced by that person (such as stress or fatigue).

Whether during drafting, training or conflict, ROE present a variety of challenges and tradeoffs. For example, ROE designed to limit escalation can put friendly forces at risk, particularly where the enemy has no formal ROE. Evaluating draft ROE is a major challenge in the absence of a conflict arena.

ROE3 offers a number of significant benefits:

Candidate ROE can be systematically evaluated for effectiveness and unforeseen implications.
ROE3 encourages ROE formalisation standards, thus reducing the cost and time taken to evaluate changes to ROE.
ROE3 includes modeling human variability factors like stress and fatigue, thereby supporting the evaluation of how these moderators can affect ROE application in a wide variety of circumstances.

This application is described in more detail here: BRIMS 2007 Best Paper

ISR Broker™

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:21:14 +1100

The ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) Broker is designed to assist the human (e.g. pilot or weapons systems operator) to source critical ISR sensor data and deliver such data to the necessary onboard systems in order to successfully prosecute a mission. In other words the ISR Broker is designed to “provide the most appropriate information at the right time”. To do this it accesses the wide variety of information available from the multitude of sensors and information sources available in a Network Enabled environment.

Future military fighter, strike and surveillance aircraft will need to continuously obtain updated external sensor data from the Global Information Grid (GIG) network. To meet this requirement, the reactive ISR Broker is being developed as a prototype by AOS, in conjunction with the Australian Defence Department’s New Air Combat Capability (NACC) Office. The core of the ISR Broker Is an autonomous decision support capability provided by AOS’s JACK product.

The ISR Broker will need to know geographically where to look for the sensor information, know what sensors are on the network, know specific sensor attributes such as coverage areas, mobility, data rates and most importantly assess the confidence level of the data available. Once such ISR requests to the GIG have been broadcast by the ISR Broker, the relevant external sensor data will be uploaded to the aircraft and the ISR Broker will be able to filter the inputs by ID, type, location, age and confidence. Finally, the ISR Broker will then be able to route the data to the appropriate onboard system such as a MMS, data fusion engine, navigation or weapon system for processing.

An aircraft’s inflight mission tasking may change with minimal notice and the operator (e.g. strike aircraft pilot or weapons system operator) may consequently be experiencing very high workload in a hostile environment. In such situations, the ISR Broker will greatly assist the operator with the onboard sourcing, filtering and routing of critical external ISR sensor data, with minimal human intervention.

The benefits are:

Efficient use of available NEC capability in a timely manner.
Reduced human workload, allowing the human to focus on analysis and decision-making, while the software performs the data acquisition and assessment.
Enhanced systems effectiveness as a result of improved situation assessment.

Intelligent PHM

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:20:18 +1100

The Intelligent Prognostic Health Manager (iPHM), developed by AOS, is an autonomous system that takes prognostics to the next level of capability.

It combines existing fault diagnosis techniques with Estimated Time to Failure under various conditions and provides recommended courses of action - for example to a military pilot, ship's engineer or an onboard Mission Management System.

Utilising iPHM, autonomous systems can intelligently react and accommodate failures, allowing them to maximise their remaining capability.

iPHM can be applied to various systems on manned or autonomous air, ground, sea or underwater platforms, including Power Management Systems, Mission Management Systems, Sensor Systems and Communications Systems.

iPHM can also be utilised in commercial applications such as oil platforms, mining plants, merchant ships and on civil aircraft.

BRAILLE

Sat, 05 May 2007 18:59:57 +1000

BRAILLE (Behaviour Recognition Agents in a Land Logistics Environment) is an application that assists human intelligence officers in recognising “interesting” behaviours from a surveillance picture. The BRAILLE agents analyse a stream of entity positions on the battlefield, and provide visual feedback through a map display to highlight movement patterns that are indicative of logistics supply chains, and group behaviours. The objective of the software is to utilise real-time or stored target positional movement data and then discern similar/dissimilar behaviour patterns and common land/air/sea usage patterns.

Similar behaviour patterns can include:

quantitative, where several targets are ascertained to be grouped closely together at common periods; or
qualitative, where targets are matched to specific attributes, for example low speed or high speed, or heading in a specific direction, for example west-south-west from a specific location.

Common land (including sea and air) usage patterns can include:

multiple usage of the same terrain;
areas where targets stay put for some time; or
areas that are re-visited repeatedly by the same targets.

The BRAILLE application was developed for Australia’s Defence Scientific Technology Organisation (DSTO).