Methods to Assess Technology Insertion Impact and Optimized Manning

The process of implementing and evaluating new and sometimes disruptive technologies on U.S. Navy ships and other maritime vessels is lengthy and intense. Micro-level changes in technology can cause macro-level changes to emerge that ripple through the ship infrastructure and radically impact business processes and ultimately the sailor. The sustainability and survivability of ships is determined by the degree to which information and other technologies permit crew to execute business processes and operate ship's infrastructure. We propose a multi-agent modeling and simulation platform to help predict the impact of technology insertions in the Navy ships. Our approach to achieving this objective is to develop and exercise human (crew), process (workflow) and infrastructure models using intelligent agents, which are programmed with the behaviors and rules required for interacting in a ship SoS.