About the Webcast

The Department of War is increasingly using digital twins and digital engineering to support training, testing, cybersecurity, mission rehearsal, and AI-enabled analysis. But building a useful digital representation raises a fundamental question: How much of the real system needs to be reproduced for an effective simulation? In this webcast, we draw on a decade of developing and deploying

GHOSTS

to examine how engineers can determine the level of realism needed to meet objectives and use that determination to decide what must be modeled—including networks, users, organizations, adversaries, and autonomous agents—and what can safely be left out.

What Will Attendees Learn?

• how GHOSTS evolved over a decade of cyber exercises, experimentation, and operational use.
• why more simulation detail does not automatically produce more useful or realistic results.
• how GHOSTS models interactions between people, organizations, information, cyber systems, and increasingly autonomous agents.
• how the concept of sufficient realism can guide the design of simulations for training, experimentation, and mission rehearsal.

Who Should Attend?

• digital engineering, digital twin, and modeling and simulation leads
• cyber operations, cyber range, and training leaders
• program managers, systems engineers, and test and evaluation professionals
• mission engineering, experimentation, and AI and autonomy practitioners

About the Speakers

Dustin Updyke is a researcher and engineer at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and modeling and simulation. He created and leads development of GHOSTS, an open source simulation framework that has supported cyber training and experimentation across Department of War environments for more than a decade. His current work explores how human, organizational, social, cognitive, and autonomous-agent behavior can be incorporated into increasingly complex mission simulations while maintaining the level of realism necessary for useful training, testing, and experimentation.

Matthew Butkovic is the technical director of the Cyber Risk and Resilience Assurance Directorate in the CERT Division of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Butkovic performs operational resilience research and develops methods, tools, and techniques for evaluating capabilities and managing risk.