Automated Instructor Assistant for Ship Damage Control

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 blackboardbased 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.