Probes uses the situation space to control its monitoring, form its assessment of the team and selectively report that assessment. In Probes, a situation space is defined as a set of situations, with each situation being a 3-tuple consisting of:
The situation space discussed here was designed as follows. The Army's instructional material laid out the mission goals, the kinds of situations (our term) that occur in pursuing the exercise goals along with the subset of behaviors that need to be assessed in those situations. Reinforced by our observations of actual training sessions, this material essentially provided the structure of the situation space at a high level: the types of situations, as well as the nature of the transitions and evaluations associated with those situations.
From there, the actual transition, evaluation and initialization functions were defined, roughly in that order. For instance, the transition from the ``Travel'' to ``Action on Contact'' situations required Probes to determine the conditions under which transitions could be assumed for both team perspective and pedagogical perspectives. If the information to make these determinations was unavailable or hidden, then a means of inferring the transition was developed, in particular by detecting changes in behavioral trends.
Next, evaluation functions were defined. For instance, the instructional material and our observations revealed the importance of evaluating travel formation, as well as how it was assessed in doctrine and in practice. Additionally, a limited set of data from actual exercises was available that included instructor evaluations on wedge formations. That data was run through a system for inducing oblique decision trees [10] and the resulting decision tree was used as an additional source of information, in order to objectively characterize what the instructors' considered important. Based on these various sources, we created an evaluation function that assessed the key characteristics of a wedge and refined it by testing against ModSAF tank platoons. To delimit the information being presented to instructors, the reporting of the assessment was restricted to when those characteristics qualitatively changed.
Given the information used by the transition and evaluation functions, the initialization functions and associated monitors could be defined. The various monitors used by Probes were built into ModSAF and invoked via a software interface. As examples, periodic monitors would report the team's location, event driven monitors would report when the team had been spotted by an opposing team and asynchronous monitors were used to assess intervisibility between vehicles.
Across all the exercises for platoon training, the instructional material was laid out in a modular fashion that shared exercise goals, situations and assessment criteria. This suggests that the application of situation spaces across the full suite of platoon exercises could be semi-automated.