Abstract
While many complex models and simulations exist, tools to help evaluate the structure of work between humans and autonomous systems are underdeveloped. There is a need to understand what concepts of operations and function allocations of system(s) imply about the system' efficiency and outcome. In this paper, we define key elements necessary to capture in an abstraction schematic, a formal representation, of “work” for simulation systems, implemented with an example simulation system, Work Models that Compute (WMC5). This generalization has many applications in evaluating the understanding key cognitive domains in autonomy, coherency, function allocation, and more. We provide a simple methodology to generate an abstraction schematic for simulations and walk through building such a schematic for a simulation. This system creates a template (e.g. defining skeletons classes, objects, and methods) for programmers to further develop. This paper demonstrates the importance of abstraction schematics for model evaluation through several examples applications of the schematic to drastically reduce workflow for developing WMC5 code, and further investigate the model through graph network structures. Abstraction schemas, as we demonstrate, are simple to develop, useful for evaluating system structure, and help validate interactions between agents and autonomous systems. Abstraction schemas jumpstart system designers in developing models of work prior to simulation development.