Situation Awareness in Synthetic Environments: Towards a Computational Model

The simulation of the behaviour of autonomous entities in space is an interesting research method to advance our understanding of the interaction of human beings with the environment. Although rather complex cognitive models of human-level Situation Awareness (SA) in dynamic environments exist, computational approaches to represent the same remain at best ad-hoc – cognitively inadequate or bearing little or no resemblance to the qualitative manner in which humans seemingly represent & reason about knowledge. The aim of our research is to investigate the computational aspects of situation awareness of autonomous entities in large-scale simulated spaces, called Synthetic Environments (SE). This is done within the scope of an understanding of situation awareness that encompasses common-sense conceptual reasoning and integrated qualitative reasoning about space, time & causality. As a product of our research, we envisage to develop a logic based computational framework based on a unified representational semantics for space, time & causality – the essence of which is a process model involving abstract ontological commitments involving spatial, temporal and action/event oriented concepts, alongwith a capability to handle concurrent and continuous phenomena. The framework, which is representative of our model of situation awareness, will be most beneficial for systems involving the representation of physical and/or intelligent autonomous processes. However, as an exemplar of our approach, we are interested in applying the framework for the representation of autonomous behaviour in defence Modelling & Simulation (M&S) applica-