Gnosys and SAIC have developed a tool - Political Geographic
Religious Economic and Demographic Simulation (PGREDS) - that will
allow a
scenario designer to bring to bear multi-disciplinary models to define civilian and non-military sides in
scenario generations and execution systems.
The strength of tools is three-fold:
1) In the incorporation of leading-edge, multi-disciplinary models and its ability to include, without limitation, any number of new models.
2) In its ability to resolve multiple, potentially conflicting answers from many different models into a single, consistent resolution.
3) In its ability to easily interface with existing scenario generation and execution systems.
With PGREDS, the process
of executing models and
resolving them may be repeated until the “rules of resolution” are
finely honed
to a scenario. In order to make use of
these results, Gnosys and SAIC will build interfaces to the pre-eminent
mission
rehearsal systems such as OneSAF.
1)
Pick 2 countries from the map by using the toolbar
buttons. The geographic location of the
episode is known as the “Episode Country”; there exists a button of the
same
label. Click this button, and then
select the country where the episode took place. Similarly,
select a country against which the terrorist episode
was directed. Use the “Target Country”
button on the toolbar. The PGREDS screen may look something like this:
2)
Define the Episode. From the Menu bar, select
“Episode”
choice. A pop-up menu will appear with
currently only one choice. Select the
“Edit/ViewEpisode”. The following menu
will appear:
Select predefined characteristics of the terrorist episode or
type
them in the input space provided.
3) View or Edit the PGREDS factors that define the terrorist episode. Each model in PGREDS has its own set of factors. There are thus at least 5 factors sets corresponding to the five models integrated in PGREDS (Political Geographic Religious Economic and Demographic models). The Resolver also has a factor set into which it resolves the factor sets of the other models. To see any of these factors, go to the Menu bar and select “Factors” choice. A pop-up menu will appear from which the user can choose to view factor corresponding to:
· Political Model
· Geographic Model
· Religious Model
· Economic Model
· Demographic Model
· Resolved factors
4) Select to view the “Geographic” factors from the menu. A new popup will appear that enables viewing the factors in categories. This is intended to de-clutter the presentation of what can be many different factors. Currently, the categories correspond to the models but this need not be so.
Outside of the predefined types, there is the ability for the user to type in a category. This is in anticipation of the expansion of the variety of categories in the future. Select “All Factors” from the predefined types.
5)
The following menu will appear:
The
Factors’ values can be of any type:
string, integer, fraction, etc.
For demonstration purposes, change the “Ethnic Distrust” entry to a
value over
100, say 101.
6)
Run the Geographic Model.
From the Menu bar, select “Factors” choice.
A pop-up menu will appear with the various models to analyze the
episode. These are the models that will
be incorporated from research institutions into PGREDS.
Any one of them can be executed, or all of
them can be executed at once.
Currently, these models do nothing notwithstanding the pop-up
that
indicates that they have been executed successfully.
7)
Repeat steps 3) through 6) for the Religious Model.
8)
Resolve the models.
Had the models executed, the Factors of the episode would have
changed. (these can be inspected at any
time via the “Factors” menu choice as described in Step 3.). Each model run would have produced its own
set of Factors as answers. These exist
in PGREDS. However, they must be
unified into one answer. To do so, they must be merged (or resolved) using rule based inference techniques. Currently PGREDS has two sets of rules:
Geographic and religious model resolution rules. (These
are test prototypes.)
From the Menu bar, select “Resolver” choice.
A pop-up menu will appear as shown below. Select
which factor sets to resolve amongst each other.
9)
Review the Factors by choosing “Edit/View Current
Resolved
Models” as indicated in Step 3. The
Resolver would have changed them according to its rule-based inference. For example, check the “Ethnic Distrust”
entry. It will have been changed.
10) Some other features include
a. Saving the factor set in Microsoft Access (Under the file menu) for later use. These factors can then also be inspected or changed via Access. The db file is in db6.mdb in the Program Files/GnosysSAIC/ directory.
b. Searching for countries on the map via the “?” toolbar
c. Zoom-in/Zoom out and Pan
d. Selective display of map detail according to zoom level.