Cognitive Modelling for Decision Support in Naval Command & Control

Traditionally, a decision support system is built to help a broad range of users in their decision making. However, there are some domains such as air traffic control, the nuclear industry, and certain military tasks, where it is critical that particular individuals make correct judgements for the safety of themselves and others. For such people, it is possible that a decision support system tailored to their own individual way of working can help them in their decision making tasks. Decision makers in such environments can be viewed as using naturalistic decision making methods, and cognitive models of such people performing a simulated electronic warfare task have been implemented using the Soar architecture, for inclusion in a decision support system. This task was chosen because it displays the characteristics most relevant to naturalistic decision making, namely rapid decision making in complex, real-time environments. For decision making in the unstructured and dynamic real world, this .approach of employing cognitive models of the users, embedded in a decision support system, appears to hold much promise to help them in this task.