Coordination and Performance Metrics in Command and Control Environments

Measurement of coordination and performance in team training environments is essential for accurately evaluating training effectiveness and progress. Coordination and performance are tightly coupled. As coordination improves, team performance improves. As command and control systems become larger and more complex, measurement of performance and coordination becomes increasingly difficult. This Phase II effort will focus on developing coordination and performance metrics that can be used in the Joint Theater Air Ground Simulation System (JTAGSS), with special emphasis on the Air Support Operations Center (ASOC) component of JTAGSS. We will be further developing a Model of Coordinated Cognition (MCC) using computer based agents to represent task roles. Each role can have experimenter-adjustable behaviors and features which are statistically driven during simulations. This allows us to test training systems inexpensively, and to add, subtract, and change roles and procedural/declarative knowledge easily. Coordination and performance metrics will be included in the MCC. For the ASOC and other task environments, the MCC agent based framework is a "sandbox" where many aspects of team/role behaviors and performance/coordination measures and metrics can be initially evaluated in the context of an ASOC analog task. System resilience and other design aspects of a task environment can also be studied.