PSYASE: An Environment for Psychological Operations Analysis

This paper describes PSYASE, the Psychological Operations Analysis Support Environment, which has been developed as a prototype system to demonstrate how intelligent agent technologies could support Psychological Operations (PSYOP). It begins by describing a general agent-based architecture for automated support to PSYOP. It then proceeds to describe the subset of this architecture which has been implemented as a prototype. This PSYASE prototype consists of an agent-based environment in which information agents gather information on potential target audiences to be analyzed with the help of a susceptibility analysis agent. Results of the susceptibility analysis are fed to a psychological simulation agent, which simulates the responses and interactions of actors in a campaign domain. The simulated domain entities constitute another level and type of software agent within the PSYASE system. These tools are designed to aid in the analysis of potential target audiences and support the exploration of the space of possible outcomes via a social simulation environment.