Team Coordination as a Model for Multi-Agent Interaction Training

Abstract

Complex decision-making processes in a naval Combat Information Center (CIC) rely significantly on effective coordination by the entire CIC team. As part of the Navy TADMUS program, this research effort seeks to investigate how teams can successfully adapt their decision-making and coordination strategies to changing tactical environments, and proposes team training interventions and structural reconfigurations that can enhance the team’s ability to maintain superior performance under a wide range of stressful operational conditions.

A model-driven experimental study (TACT — Team Adaptation and Coordination Training) was conducted in which CIC teams are specifically trained to adapt to stress and coordinate their tactical activities accordingly. The central premise for developing recommendations on team training and structuring evolve around the notion of team adaptation: high-performance teams, when faced with an increasingly demanding task environment, will adapt their decision-making strategies, coordination strategies, and even their structure in order to maintain stress under an acceptable threshold while keeping a required level of performance. The main hypothesis derived from the premise of team adaptation to stress is the team coordination strategies evolve from explicit coordination under low workload conditions to implicit coordination as workload increases.

Hypotheses were tested in the TACT experiment using sixty military officers as participants. The experiment was conducted in a network-based experimental task that simulates operations in a naval CIC environment. A command team of five decision-makers, the Tactical Action Officer and his staff, must coordinate complex, multi-dimensional, and ambiguous information to accomplish the mission prescribed in each scenario. A mixed within/between subject experimental design was used to maximize the diagnosticity the experimental manipulation. Experimental findings indicate that the TACT training makes a significant difference in improving the teams’ performance, especially in conditions of high stress. Further analysis of the data show that this improvement in tactical outcome is related to a dramatic shift in team coordination and communication strategies, resulting in stronger teamwork skills and adaptive anticipatory behavior on the part on the team members.

A central theme that emerged from our field research is the lack of systematic team training for naval command crews. In addition to the existing individual competency training, and the regular team building process, this research is a first step to improve the functioning and the coordination of the team decision-making process, with a specific focus on the design of multi-agent interaction strategies. If command teams can be trained to adapt their coordination strategies adequately and to reconfigure their structure appropriately, they will be able to maintain a superior level of performance under increasing levels of external stress.