An Intelligent Multi User Simulation Environment (MUSE) for Use over the Internet

In Phase I, SHAI will investgate, design, and implement a prototype of an intelligent Multi User Simulation Environment (MUSE) which operates across the Internet. This MUSE would be used to run tactical scenarios with geographically distributed team players. The most difficult aspect of this problem deals with the need to intelligently control all the tactical platforms in the scenario. We will develop a general schema for military warfare tactics representation and execution in MUSE using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Expert System and graphical techniques to capture the human decision processes. Since the representation and automatic execution of tactics is a complex problem we will take an integrated approach using a variety of paradigms, including tactical diagrams and drawings, transition diagrams, constraint satisfaction, scripts, intelligent entities, case-based reasoning, planning and scheduling, and knowledge-based representations (rules, objects), techniques we have used with much success in previous projects. Foremost, we will devise a general distributed tactical simulation capability which includes intelligent platform control and a representation schema for military tactics. We will devise methods for real-time Internet communication and coordination of the distributed tactical simulation. We will absolutely prove the feasibility of our ideas through the development of a limited, proof-of-concept prototype.