The Automated Exercise and Assessment System (AEAS) is a simulation sponsored by the National Guard Bureau to enhance coordination in the civilian world of emergency response to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The system simulates WMD events to allow emergency responders to utilize their own Incident Command System and generally exercise cognitive and decision-making skills to respond to the crisis. The WMD scenarios will cover a range of incidents, including chemical, biological and radiological attacks.

Simulating such wide ranging and complex events can quickly become intractable. Each command decision made in a scenario has downstream consequences. The traditional computer-based training approach would be to use a decision tree, but the complexity of the scenarios makes enumerating all possible paths unreasonable, limiting the allowable decisions. Instead, AEAS has formalized Tasks, Conditions and Standards (TCSs) for each emergency response role in a given type of WMD situation. These TCSs are encoded in a command-based format and used to track and drive decisions in the simulation. This formalization allows players to be evaluated against a set of expected actions as well as prompted for correct actions in a training format. The TCSs are also used to guide simulated entities which may be standing in for human role players, permitting a simulation run to be adaptable to the available training audience size. The expected actions in a situation comprises one of a set of evaluation conditions that also includes overall simulation results such as fatality and property damage mitigation, and public opinion. This paper will discuss how a set of TCSs can be derived, used to drive player and simulation actions in a given scenario, and how they are incorporated into the After Action Review and evaluation criteria.