VISualization of Threats and Attacks (VISTA): A Decision Support Tool for Urban Threat Environments

Kathleen M. Carley Carnegie Mellon University [email protected] Abstract Urban threat environments, including urban warfare and disaster scenarios, can be characterized as complex systems. Decision making in urban threat environments may be difficult because the underlying system exhibits non-linear and path dependent behavior that humans, unassisted by computers, have trouble understanding and reasoning about. Thus, it may be difficult to predict how the consequences of an action may unfold. VISTA, a computational model is presented as a decision-support tool to be able to help the analyst understand the complexity of an urban threat environment, thereby enabling forecasting of conditions and the exploration of potential consequences of potential actions. A demonstrative use-case is presented along with hypothetical results to illustrate the tool’s potential usefulness. Attention is also paid to the usefulness and challenges of providing an “explanation” of the tool’s results. Initial approaches to the problem are presented.