Type of Research: Corporate (Micro Analysis & Design, Inc. and Northrop Grumman Mission Systems) funded by Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Terms and abbreviations used in this paper:
CART = Combat Automation Requirements Testbed
ARL = Army Research Laboratory
IMPRINT = Improved Performance Research Integration Tool
HLA = High Level Architecture
RTI = Run Time Infrastructure
COM = Component Object Model
HPM = Human Performance Modeling
HBR = Human Behavioral Representation
CMC2 = Cultural Modeling of Command and Control
Summary:
“This technical effort consisted of three primary objectives:
- Investigate cultural factors and add cultural modeling capabilities to the Combat Automation Requirements Testbed (CART), an existing human performance modeling (HPM) tool, to allow users to easily inject cultural effects into a human performance model.
- Create a client-server interface between CART and the Joint Integrated Mission Model (JIMM) constructive simulation to allow JIMM entities to receive higher fidelity behavioral representation from an external simulation tool.
- Develop a model of an Integrated Air Defense System (IADS) for two different cultures to demonstrate the functionality of the enhanced CART tool as well as the interaction of CART and JIMM operating in a client-server environment.”
“The Cultural Lens is a concept for a tool which would help leaders from one culture view a situation from the perspective of another culture.” To implement this they created a cultural editing tool (CMC2 Tool). The first step is to create “human performance task networks, breaking down actions into functions (or sub-networks) and tasks” (screen shot below):
Above the CART task network. Below the Cultural Parameter Interface:
Above the Cultural Macro Interface. Below the Cultural Template Interface.
The interface between JIMM and CART. This is how their Cultural Lens was implemented.
The used variables such as:
Distribution of Power (DP) is the perceived difference in power between an individual (member of the military) and his superior.
Willingness to Take Risk (WR) is defined for this project as an individual's willingness to make decisions that place him in vulnerable situations thereby risking the consequences of errors.
Familiarity with the Enemy (FE) is defined as the extent to which a culture has had prior interaction with its enemy.
Comments:
This project certainly had a feeling of déjà vu all over again (it is very reminiscent of the CyberWar XXI project that I worked on).
When amorphous, fuzzy and hard-to-define subjects such as “Willingness to Take Risks” are digitized (a value is arbitrarily assigned to it) I get decidedly uncomfortable about the validity of the simulation. This is not the same process as converting analog sound files to digital. At some point a human being is going to arbitrarily assign values to all these variables that will then “define” a human — or in this case, cultural — personality.
Many times the customer gets a feeling that the results of these simulations are somehow more accurate just because they are run on a computer. But the truth of the matter is that once a human arbitrarily assigns values to these variables that will affect the results of the simulation the simulation has no more validity (and possibly quite a bit less) than the same human being pontificating on the subject.
Indeed, a human predicting that troops from Country X will run away at the first sign of battle has just as much validity as a computer simulation that has been arbitrarily weighted to come to the same results.