Perceptions, Inferences, and Associations Model for Infantry Soldiers (PIAMIS)

The US Army Natick Soldier Center develops and applies modeling and simulation (M&S) technologies to evaluate warfighter systems vis-à-vis impact on individual and small-unit effectiveness. Currently, many simulations use scripts and simple rules to produce behavior in simulated entities with ground-truth data as inputs. To be effective for simulation-based acquisition (SBA) efforts, simulations must accurately model the visual and auditory perceptual processes of warfighters and the inferences and associations they make about their environment. We propose the Perceptions, Inferences, and Associations Model of Infantry Soldiers (PIAMIS) system, which will address this problem through the development of: 1) an extensible Perception Model that takes ground-truth data from the simulation and produces realistic sensory perceptions for the combat environment; 2) an Inference and Association engine instantiated with mappings to produce real-time inferences and associations based on input from the Perception Model; and 3) a knowledge engineering (KE) tool that uses an immersive simulation environment to present SMEs a tactical situation and an automated cognitive task analysis process to derive a mapping of perceptions to inferences and associations applied to that situation. We propose to demonstrate PIAMIS with a scenario in the IWARS simulation environment.