Modeling Ground Soldier situational awareness for constructive simulation with rules

The behavior models that control simulated warfighters in most modeling and simulation (M&S) efforts are fairly simple, relying predominantly on behavior scripting and simple rules to produce actions. As a result, the simulated entities do not reflect critical situational awareness factors used by Ground Soldiers or allow for the modeling of devices that influence situational awareness, such as user defined operating pictures (UDOPs). This paper describes our approach to this challenge, providing 1) a rule-based method for modeling Ground Soldier situational awareness and devices that influence situational awareness and 2) a user friendly graphical authoring tool for creating these rules. We present a requirements analysis of this modeling task and discuss and provide examples of how our method may be employed for modeling Soldier perception and inferences as well as devices that affect situational awareness.