The SEAS-VIS model is a representation of the Institutions, Organizations, Leaders, Individuals, and Infrastructure that make up a society. The geography of the society is modeled at various levels including City, Province, Country, Region, and World in terms of Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, and Infrastructure (PMESII) nodes. The virtual environment integrates multiple theories from various disciplines to program behaviorally accurate agents with dynamic rules that govern and guide their actions and interactions. SEAS-VIS facilitates a seamless and interchangeable integration of human and software agents and allows for testing the efficacy of theories, decisions, strategies, and tools.
Models are made fully transparent to allow for close scrutiny by the client, facilitating model critique and development.
SEAS-VIS offers the ability to do course of action analysis, test hypotheses, learn through experimentation, conduct effects-based operations and planning, and develop Operational Net Assessment. The product allows the user to evaluate and manage the challenges of international crises.
Simulex products employing the SEAS-VIS technology include ACCESS and SEAS-Rx.
ACCESS is a recruiting simulation developed for the United States Army Accessions Command (USAAC). Its purpose is to help an organization meet recruiting goals by enabling continuous experimentation of strategic planning, such as resource allocation, new recruiting business processes, reorganization, workforce improvement, perception improvement, missioning strategies, and new policies.
ACCESS centers on an agent-based Artificial Labor Market (ALM) which mirrors the US population down to the ZIP code level. The traits of each potential recruit, such as education, intelligence, and work experience are assigned based on validated USAAC and US Census studies, social sciences, and psychology theories. Recruiter agents are assigned effectiveness ratings and capability of actions such as conducting interviews and generating and contacting leads.
Interactions in the ALM between recruiters and potential recruits are governed by the user’s actions and business processes specific to each organization, rather than being pre-configured into the simulation. Results can be explored with features such as course of action analysis, multi-user collaboration, and online analysis tools.
SEAS-NRT consists of human behavior models that are best suited to a short period of time (within hours), such as conflicts resulting from ethnic tensions, recruitment into insurgent cells, and gathering intelligence within culturally relevant contexts.
The basic entity in SEAS-NRT is a synthetic representation of an individual. The individual is the basic component of all simulations built upon the SEAS platform, such as SEAS-VIS. A consistent representation of individuals in SEAS-NRT and SEAS-VIS enables the same individuals to exist in both and to be influenced by a wide range of behavior models. Individuals respond to the media and world public opinion models in SEAS-VIS, placing the individual in a dynamic global context. SEAS-NRT with SEAS-VIS provides a consistent representation of individuals, simultaneously linking the individual to global, regional, national, city, and local, city block contexts.
The SEAS-NRT models are designed to be sensitive to the wall clock, filling the gap between third-party, real-time simulations and coarser-grained behavior simulations, all bridged within the SEAS environment using SimBridge.
Simulex products employing the SEAS-NRT technology include SEAS-ATC, BioReady and SES.
The SEAS-ATC tool emulates a synthetic Air Traffic Control (ATC) domain within the SEAS technology platform for agent-based simulation. SEAS-ATC emulates agent-to-agent interactions with the objective of guiding each aircraft safely through the airspace, re-routing as needed. It provides the capabilities to model and analyze the impact of strategic decisions made by the various members of the air traffic community. Several different types of agents affect one another, including FAA member agents such as national and regional ATC System Command Centers, and airline member agents such as Airline Operations Centers and the aircraft themselves. The experimental possibilities include evaluating alternative operational concepts for the FAA and the airlines, redefining sector boundaries, and evaluating the adoption of new technology by various members of the ATC community.
SEAS-ATC produces a full set of output to support the analysis of experiments. These include a post-simulation animation showing aircraft flying through the airspace, a performance summary report which indicates how many aircraft were re-routed and the overall impact achieved (reductions in miles off route, minutes delayed, operating costs, etc.) and simulated black box data enabling detailed analysis of what was planned versus what occurred for each flight.
BioReady simulates a bio-terrorist attack and determines the outcome of the attack based on the severity and strength of attack and the actions taken by Department of Homeland Security agencies and other such agencies such as the FBI, TSA, CDC, DOJ, FEMA, the American Red Cross, the State Police, the State Counter-Terrorism, and the National Security Council. BioReady simulates the spread of a biological pathogen through the population and models results of the actions taken to limit the spread of disease and treat the population exposed to the disease.
Bio-terrorist simulations have indicated that a rapid, decisive response limits the effectiveness of the attack by preventing the spread of the disease, limiting the number of people exposed and limiting the number of casualties. BioReady is a tool for DHS agencies to evaluate their potential responses to a bio-terrorist attack. It uses contagion (SARS, smallpox, anthrax, ricin, cholera, etc.) and epidemiological (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) models to replicate the rate of transmission and infection as a function of population density, mobility, social structure, and lifestyle using a time space model.
BioReady can be conducted by an individual person over the internet, or by multiple federal state and local agencies in a distributed collaborative simulation allowing multiple agencies to participate, from multiple geographic regions simultaneously over the internet.
SES (Synthetic Environments for Smartships) simulates how the introduction of new technologies affects the behavior of individuals’ work paths in a specified environment. The Smartship environment currently under development, a Navy destroyer, is populated with intelligent agents representing crew members and outfitted with a wireless network infrastructure. The short- and long-term impact of this technology on shipboard business processes can be understood by modifying and analyzing the actions of crew members via integrated toolsets.
SES features SIDE (SEAS Integrated Development Environment), a Web-based tool enabling users to visualize and rapid-prototype agents and workflows. Using SIDE, simulation entities can be tweaked to better reflect real-world data. SIDE also grants users the ability to create completely custom workflows rather than restricting users to a pre-defined (and often inadequate) set of options.
A fully 3D representation of the events of the simulation completes the SES package. SIDE permits users to visually examine any agent in detail or “replay” the simulation to understand what behaviors or tasks lead to an observed situation.