Automated instructor assistant for ship damage control

  • Authors:
  • Vadim V. Bulitko;David C. Wilkins

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • AAAI '99/IAAI '99 Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence and the eleventh Innovative applications of artificial intelligence conference innovative applications of artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 1999

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The decision making task of ship damage control includes addressing problems such as fire spread, flooding, smoke, equipment failures, and personnel casualties. It is a challenging and highly stressful domain with a limited provision for real-life training. In response to this need, a multimedia interactive damage control simulator system, called DC-Train 2.0 was recently deployed at a Navy officer training school; it provides officers with an immersive environment for damage control training. This paper describes a component of the DC-Train 2.0 system that provides feedback to the user, called the automated instructor assistant. This assistant is based on a blackboard-based expert system called Minerva-DCA, which is capable of solving damage control scenarios at the "expert" level. Its innovative blackboard architecture facilitates various forms of user assistance, including interactive explanation, advising, and critiquing. In a large exercise involving approximately 500 ship crises scenarios, Minerva-DCA showed a 76% improvement over Navy officers by saving 89 more ships.