Issues in the Conduct of Comparisons among Human Performance Models and Live Human Performance in Complex Simulated Task Environments

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The Air Force Research Laboratory has sponsored the Agent-based Modeling and Behavior Representation (AMBR) Project to advance the state of the art in human performance modeling in general and the state of practice in cost-effective computer generated forces more specifically (Pew and Mavor, 1998). To advance human performance modeling they have created an opportunity for multiple developers to create different models of the same human operator activity and to compare the results both from model to model and with human participants performing the same task. As you will learn in a later talk, in the course of this project these model comparisons will be conducted three times, each time using different, hopefully more demanding, human modeling requirements. The first comparison is now complete and the results were reported at the International Ergonomics Society Meeting in July 2000. The project is important because it is rare to have the opportunity to validate human performance models, and even rarer to be able to compare and contrast the results of multiple model developers who use different model architectures and draw their models from different theoretical perspectives.