We made two moves to use Situation Spaces to analyze Team behavior. First, we transformed the goals indicated by a situation from goals-to-be-achieved to behaviors-to-be-analyzed. For instance, the goal associated with traveling in a wedge, along a route to the blocking position, becomes an analysis goal to determine how well the team is traveling. Similarly, the action on contact goals of ``targeting'' and ``avoid being an easy target'' become how well they are targeting and avoid being targeted.
The other move we made was to allow for multiple perspectives. This move is necessary because the team of students may have a different perspective from the pedagogical agent as to what the current situation is, and such discrepancies provide key pedagogical assessments. For instance, the students may transition to an action on contact situation and start firing at what they think is the opposition, but actually are distant rocks. Meanwhile, the pedagogical agent, due to its larger perspective, will know that the transition to action on contact was a mistake. Conversely, the pedagogical agent may identify a viable enemy threat which the students have not seen, perhaps due to a failure in their scanning for the enemy.
A consequence of maintaining multiple perspectives is that, for those transitions that could result in a bifurcation of perspective, there needs to be a transition arc for each perspective. So for the transition from the traveling to the action on contact situations there need to be 2 arcs, one for the pedagogical perspective and one for the team perspective. (Figure 3 shows only one of these arcs.)
Another consequence of maintaining multiple perspectives is that we need to determine which situation is the appropriate basis for monitoring and reporting analyses. Currently, we have found it sufficient to report analyses based on the team perspective, for several reasons. Reporting an analysis of the team from a situational perspective different from that guiding their behavior tends to generate marginally useful information. In contrast, analyzing team behavior from their perspective generates the information that is needed to infer the point at which they finally transition into the ``correct'' situation. For instance, when the team is traveling in a wedge, there are certain behaviors they are supposed to exhibit such as constantly scanning their turrets and following each other at a certain distance. These behaviors are not typically appropriate during an active engagement so their cessation is a key indicator for inferring the transition of the team perspective. On the other hand, the pedagogical perspective is key in analyzing potential failures of the team in assessing their situation.
It has also been our experience that the bifurcation into two perspectives persists only for very short periods of time. There are several reasons for this. The situation space is at a very high level of abstraction so a bifurcation tends to indicate a dramatic misread of the environment. In addition, given the pressure that the domain exerts on the team's behavior, such a misread is likely not to persist for long. For example, incoming rounds are a solid indicator to the team that those ``rocks'' off in the distance are actually the opposition firing at them.
Allowing for these two perspectives has proved sufficient to date in characterizing the state of a platoon exercise. However, we could go further. Recall there are four tanks in a platoon. One might break the team perspective into individual tank perspectives, thus having the pedagogical agent track what it considers to be each tank's perspective on the current situation. Now discrepancies between tank perspectives reflect factors such as breakdown in communication or coordination.
This move towards multiple perspectives assumes that the perspectives share the same situation space. However, if there were multiple platoons being assessed, performing different missions, then different situation spaces would be more appropriate. Conversely, we may model a single agents overall behavior as being composed of distinct situations in multiple situation spaces. These points of course beg the question of composition over situations which would need further study.