Tactical Action Officer Intelligent Tutoring System (TAO ITS)

Abstract : The U.S. Navy's Surface Warfare Officers School (SWOS) in Rhode Island is pioneering the use of a low-cost, simulation-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) as part of its Tactical Action Officer (TAO) training program to train Navy officers in high-level tactical skills. This software was designed and built for SWOS for use on standard PCs, and the Navy has a royalty-free license to use it. A key objective of the software is to increase the active training that officers receive to improve their ability to apply their conceptual knowledge of tactics. Early results from its use with two classes are encouraging and indicate that the software will succeed in this goal by enabling as much as a 10-fold increase in hands-on training. The software has three parts. First, there is a scenario generator, with which instructors -- with limited assistance from a programmer -- can create any number of simulated scenarios. These can be set in any part of the world, and populated with different surface and air platforms. Each individual platform is implemented as an "intelligent agent" and can be given its own performance characteristics and behaviors. Second, there is the ITS, which presents selected scenarios to the student to practice different tactical concepts. The third part of the software is an instructor interface tool for instructors to review the students' work with the tutoring system in detail. This paper describes what the TAO ITS can do and the benefits it can provide. It also includes an explanation of why the case-based reasoning technique was used in the software to reduce three problems commonly associated with intelligent tutoring systems: effective incorporation of subject expert knowledge in the software, cost, and development time. It also reviews SWOS's experience with the software since its introduction, students' opinions of the software, and ways in which future simulation-based ITSs might be improved based on SWOS's experience.