What is Wasp?

New age battle space consists of vastly complex and dynamic environments to which human decision makers must adapt in order to achieve their objective. Moreover, the recent trend of manpower reductions necessitates the implementation of highly automated systems. Therefore, a decision maker must not only function under conditions of target ambiguity, time pressure, and information overload, he/she must also be able to effectively operate somewhat autonomous pieces of machinery. To support service members who must work in these environments, researchers should first seek to understand fundamental decision making processes in the context of situations that are dynamic, complex, and highly automated.

GT-ASP is a low fidelity Naval Air Defense Warfare simulator developed by Georgia Institute of Technology for the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (NAWCTSD).Over the past five years, the Navy has used GT-ASP in many training investigations, but the current state of technology has precluded the use of the original program. Although the proposed principal investigator has informally supported the use of the software by providing free technical assistance over the past five years, the simulation suite has become a legacy system that is no longer cost-effective to supporting rigorous scientific research. The present effort is intended to update GT-ASP to be more flexible, run on current platforms, allow the experimenter more experimental control, and add the capability to run the simulation as a team task.

Wright State Aegis Simulation Platform (WASP) is a result of our extension of GT-ASP.