Information Security Consulting Wargaming Cyber-terrorism in SEAS

Oct 09, 1998

Abstract

Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS) is a business and economic war gaming environment developed at Purdue University in close association with the Department of Defense (DoD). SEAS replicates the "real world" in most crucial dimensions such as competition, regulation, decision variables, and interaction dynamics. It consists of inter-linked goods, stock, bond, labor, and currency markets. In these markets two types of agents interact: live: people acting as buyers, sellers, regulators, intermediaries virtual: artificially intelligent software agents that mimic human consumers in a narrow domain.
A game design requires four steps: setting the geography of the game, designing the game board, pieces and scoring, database customization, and calibrating parameters. SEAS war gaming process consist of three steps:

• pre-game briefing: it provides an industry overview of the players and their strategic positions and the rules of engagement.
  
• game playing: here the participants try out their long-term strategic and short-term tactical moves, evaluate their performance periodically, and make adjustments.
  
• after action review: allows participants to develop strategic insight by reviewing the performance of each of the groups, analyzing the moves, countermoves and their effectiveness, and learning from collective experiences.
  

SEAS is a highly configurable and flexible environment that is designed to prepare students and business executives to meet the current and future challenges of the global business environment. It is structured around the interplay of human decisions and game events that requires active involvement of participants in the learning process. It helps participants to come to a more complete understanding of the sources and motivations underlying the decisions by placing them in the shoes of executives running the firms in different points in time and challenging them to do better. Games dealing with current or future situations help explore the potential implications of various courses of action, and raise important questions for further investigation.