Proactive Decision Support through Information Modification
Abstract
An alarm sounds out from the interface of your ship~s integrated self-defense system. An unidentified object is moving toward your s"hip with high speed. Your responsibility is to judge whether the object is friendly or hostile, and if hostile, decide how best to e""ngage the object. Your interface provides all the information you could need for the judgment of friendly or hostile: range, altitud""e, speed, course, bearing, location of civilian airports and air corridors, legitimate commercial aircraft flight numbers. Your inte"rface also provides all the information for making the decision of engagement: the time to intercept and probability of intercept for the soft-kill options (decoys) and the hard-kill options (missiles and guns). To assess and integrate all the information would ta"ke minutes, if not hours, but you only have 20 seconds before the object is projected to intercept your ship. In these 20 seconds yo"u have to make the correct judgment and decision if you are to protect your ship and not attack friendly objects.How should you spend those 20 seconds? What judgment or decision making information should you focus on and for how long? How should you process and" integrate the information? What if the information about the object~s speed, altitude, and range is degraded because of sensor issu""es? How should your interface be designed to support you during these 20 seconds with incomplete information?Unfortunately, recent" decision support system design has been almost exclusively focused on the outdated perspective that you should be provided with as much information as possible because you should process as much information as possible. (Not much help when you only have 20 secon"ds to make life or death decisions.) To counter this perspective, researchers of human judgment and decision making have increasingl""y shown that heuristics, simple rules that use little information and can be processed quickly, can make good, sometimes optimal dec""isions, in environments with low amounts of information and time.In this proposal, we intend to leverage this recent research into" heuristics to provide the answers as to what types of decision making processes warfighters are using or should be using when faced" with various environments, time pressures, and incomplete information. Furthermore, we intend to understand how information can be" modified in decision support systems so that warfighters can be effectively supported to achieve high performance in these stressfu"l environments.To achieve these goals, we will use a hybrid of computational simulations and human-subjects studies of judgment an"d decision making with incomplete information within this naval defense domain. We will first complete the construction of a simulat"ion engine capable of modeling various environments, time pressures and incomplete information, and strategies likely to be used by" warfighters. The simulation engine will also measure the performance and the amount of time and effort required to make judgements and decisions. Then through a series of computational and human-subject studies we will identify how incomplete information and tim"e pressure affects the performance of various strategies in these naval defense tasks. From these studies, prototype decision suppor""t tools and training procedures will be developed for warfighters requiring high performance in time-stressed, degraded information" decision tasks.This research will be the foundation for proactive decision support systems that can adapt to both the context of" the decision making task (the environment, and the amount of time and information available to the decision maker) and to the strat"egies used by the warfighter.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Nov 03, 2017
- Source ID
- N000141713009
Entities
People
- Karen Feigh
Organizations
- Georgia Tech Research Corporation
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy