The Neocities Simulation: Understanding the Design and Experimental Methodology Used to Develop a Team Emergency Management Simulation

Abstract

This paper describes the continued development of a scaled-world simulation designed to conduct empirical research on team cognition and decision-making within a distributed environment. The NeoCITIES simulation was created to study decision-making and the impact of hidden knowledge profiles on team performance within a distributed command, control, and communications (C3) setting. NeoCITIES has been designed for the purpose of representing both new and operationally relevant scaled worlds, while emulating the complexities and attributes of emergent decision-making scenarios involving emergent counterterrorism events. Because patterns of activity emerge across time, knowledge is often hidden and disconnected within and across teams. NeoCIITES has been orchestrated to assess and evaluate the extent to which teams can socially construct knowledge while ineteracting through various means of technological support. Specifically, NeoCITIES is an interactive computer program designed to display information pertaining to events and occurrences in a virtual city space. The teams in the simulation represent three separate services (e.g., Police, Fire/EMS, and Hazmat) in which they must assess situations, interact and communicate according to their inter-team and intra-team roles, allocate resources in a timely manner, and make decisions within the context of emergency crisis management. Once NeoCITIES development has been completed, the simulation will be used as an experimental task to measure the impact of hidden knowledge profiles on teamwork and decision-making in the distributed team context.