Interaction design considerations for an aircraft carrier deck agent-based simulation

Agent-based modeling techniques have been utilized for a variety of environments within the aerospace domain. For these models, there exist a diverse range of potential users with domain knowledge that ranges from little (e.g. casual gamers) to high (e.g. academic or professional researchers), each with different interests and objectives. Such models allow for both descriptive representations of complex systems that help to explain historical behaviors and outcomes, but they also help in the prospective analysis of futuristic system architectures. Thus the use of agent-based models will be particularly useful in the planning for future unmanned systems. One key issue with such agent-based simulation engines is the complexity of creating an interaction environment that can span the user expertise gap and allow for the intuitive and useful interactions, while retaining high fidelity of information. In order to achieve an interaction environment that can span both the domain and modeling knowledge gap, we propose that the setup, management, and visualization of a given agent-based simulation should be distilled into cognitively simple components that allows users of various degrees of subject matter expertise to effectively understand and manage the simulation. Such an environment should allow users of all skill levels the ability to set up various models and hypotheses, as well as understand the results. To this end we propose an interaction design framework in the context of an interaction engine built on top of an existing agent-based model of flight deck launch operations of a Navy aircraft carrier deck. In this paper, we will discuss how the design framework influenced the design of the interaction environment and how the resultant interaction environment spans the user groups that represent different levels of subject matter expertise.