Toward Computational Modeling of C2 for Teams of Autonomous Systems and People (19th ICCRTS)

Abstract

The technological capabilities of autonomous systems (AS) continue to accelerate. Although AS are replacing people in many skilled mission domains and demanding environmental circumstances, people and machines have complementary capabilities, and integrated performance by AS and people working together can be superior to that of either AS or people working alone. We refer to this increasingly important phenomenon as Teams of Autonomous Systems and People (TASP), and we identify a plethora of open, command and control (C2) research, policy and decision making questions. Computational modeling and simulation offer unmatched yet largely unexplored potential to address C2 questions along these lines. The central problem is, this kind of C2 organization modeling and simulation capability has yet to be developed and demonstrated in the TASP domain. This is where our ongoing research project begins to make an important contribution. In this article, we motivate and introduce such TASP research, and we provide an overview of the computational environment used to model and simulate TASP C2 organizations and phenomena. We follow in turn with an approach to characterizing a matrix of diverse TASP C2 contexts, as well as a strategy for specifying, tailoring and using this computational environment to conduct experiments to examine such contexts. We conclude then by summarizing our agenda for continued research along these lines.