Zhao, Ying

The human cognitive functions in an integrated fires kill chain environment and in a cyber-warfare environment are very complex. Watch station operators and tactical decision-makers must often assimilate information from multiple sources and rely on experience, training, reasoning, and critical thinking to make warfare decisions in an extremely short timeline. Complex tactical environments can create situations where human operators are overwhelmed by the amount of information to process, the complexity of the decisions that need to be made, and/or the pace at which the decisions need to be made. The Navy has developed the Naval Simulation System (NSS) to evaluate tactical systems and processes for naval operations. The critical gap with the NSS is that it does not address the cognitive layer that is critical to warfare effectiveness assessment from a system of systems perspective. This project proposes the development of a model of cognitive operations in a tactical kill chain. The agent-based model will be developed in SOAR, a program developed by the University of Michigan. The future intent is for the SOAR cognitive model to be integrated with NSS. The cognitive model will rely on SOAR production rules to model the reasoning and cognitive architecture to process conflict and ambiguity and develop situational assessment through knowledge systems, rules and heuristics. A tactical use case will be developed to aid in the SOARINSS simulation of the cognitive functions and tactical decisions in a kill chain. This research will increase our understanding of the human cognitive role in the tactical situations and may potentially enhance the development of future automated decision aids to support the tactical warfighter.nt of future automated decision aids to support the tactical warfighter.
NPS Naval Research Program
NPS Naval Research Program
Navy
2017