Overview

The Mission Builder created for the Affordable Human Behavior Modeling (AHBM) project demonstrates several examples of customization of the Discovery Machine development environment. These customizations assist experts in construction of models for the purposes of defining complex entity behaviors in the Joint Semi-Autonomous Forces (JSAF) simulation environment.

Simplification

The procedure and condition editors used by the Mission Builder system represent simplifications of the standard editors used by the Discovery Machine environment. Through simplification of these aspects of the user interface, the modeling environment becomes more accessible to experts who lack experience in expression based programming (in this case, the target user is a naval aviator with experience in combat missions).

The actual state of the actions contained within the procedure are concealed from the user. The procedure editor displays only a list of possible actions that the simulation entity can perform, and a list of actions that have been selected for execution in the procedure. This allows the user to simply select actions from a group of behaviors that they already understand. The formatting of actions, while still intact behind the scenes, is displayed to the user in a simplified form.

The condition editors are similarly simplified to present the user with only the aspects of condition definition that they need to perform their job. English words (e.g. "AND") replace standard symbols for Boolean operators used in programming languages (e.g. "&&"). The user is quickly and easily able to combine various conditional checks using these Boolean expressions to create complex conditions for use in missions.

Integration

The Mission Builder system illustrates integration of the Discovery Machine Modeler with other complex external systems. This integration allows the Mission Builder system to pull data from remote databases at runtime and also insert behaviors into the JSAF simulation environment, so that behaviors can be used immediately in simulation.

The actions and conditionals used in mission construction are retrieved from a remote database over a network. This provides severability between the user interface seen by experts, and the details of data storage for the capabilities of the simulation environment. Developers can create new atomic level actions and insert them into the database, seamlessly providing these new actions to users of the Mission Builder user interface.