IMMENS: Integrated Multi-Manager Environment for Naval Ships

Abstract

The Royal Netherlands Navy is moving towards more autonomous ships to cope with the increasingly complex naval operations while sailing with a reduced manning. The strong expansion of automation and autonomous systems on board requires new solutions for optimal collaboration between the crew and the extensive set of ship systems. We are developing a concept for an Integrated Multi-Manager Environment for Naval Ships: IMMENS. IMMENS aims to be an intelligent ship system that supports the crews of future ship classes, while enabling these crews to exercise and maintain meaningful human control. The ship's subsystems are integrated in a multi-agent system that formulates and proposes plans to the command team based on an internal representation of the ship's goals and the current situation. These plans consist of actions that are to be executed in order to achieve the mission goals. The system's computational design, combined with specific human-machine teaming functionality facilitates the crew and IMMENS to work as a joint cognitive system. This paper shortly introduces IMMENS but reports mainly on the development and application of humanmachine teaming concepts that support cooperation between the crew and IMMENS. The first concept offers interaction based on a human-machine language using Goals, Tasks, Constraints and Resources as shared knowledge elements. Since both human and machine understand these elements, human comprehension of the machine's inner workings is supported. The second concept provides the explication of relationships between goals, tasks, constraints, resources and/or external world as a means of intuitively explaining the machine's reasoning by providing transparency regarding, for instance, to which goals certain tasks contribute. Thirdly, we applied and extended on the concept of play-based delegation. A play is a plan-template that allows a user to quickly delegate a complex task to the systems, without the need to drill down, while leaving room for system intelligence to fill in the details. These concepts have been applied in an integrated interactive demonstrator of IMMENS. An evaluation with subject matter experts from the Royal Netherlands Navy and senior human factors researchers was conducted based on a scenario of a frigate escorting a high-value asset. During the design, implementation and evaluation of the demonstrator, we learned that the first concept provided a workable shared knowledge model and indeed fitted with the IMMENS architecture on the one hand, and was intuitive to the users on the other hand. Explicating relationships provided the users with relevant insights, allowing them to understand, for instance, by means of which tasks and resources IMMENS expects to achieve the mission goals. Play-based delegation was found this a clear and valuable concept. Many opportunities for future research were identified, the most important of which concerns the feasibility of constructing a valid, complete and generic goal representation for IMMENS that takes into account the comp...