Command and control in virtual environments: tailoring software agents to emulate specific people

Abstract

Development and experimentation with ELICIT (Experimental Laboratory for Investigating Collaboration, Information-sharing and Trust) is an ongoing activity of the U.S. DoD Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (OASD/NII). A recent CCRP-sponsored effort resulted in the development of a configurable sensemaking agent to enable agent-based ELICIT simulation experiments. A key step in the adoption of these configurable agents for use in research is demonstrating that these agents can be configured to behave as specific humans behave. This paper discusses how the behavior of humans in an actual ELICIT experiment is successfully modeled using sensemaking agents and provides suggestions for how the validated agents could be used in future ELICIT experiments.