(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010-12-20)
Andriano, Nelson Gregory
Military operations are complex systems composed of the interactions of many smaller discrete systems, or assets: aircraft, watercraft, troops, etc. Historically, the requirements for new assets have been created based on standalone optimization. It is not just necessary to optimize requirements for a single scenario, such as a wartime operation, but instead to optimize the requirements that will benefit the entire military operation as a whole in a number of different scenarios, such as wartime and peace time. To better define future military assets it is necessary sample a large number of scenarios. To capture all of the interactions and develop a complete understanding of the overall system, it is necessary to model both combat and logistics, which have traditionally been modeled and analyzed separately. To characterize military operations and the assets that contribute to them, it is necessary to move beyond the traditional models that use aggregated approximations for combat and stand alone nodal analysis for logistics. A unique need for a framework which captures the complex interaction between combat and logistics while allowing a large number of automated cases and scenarios to run with no human in the loop. The framework this paper discusses was created to facilitate the making of models to analyze and characterize military operations and the effects that future assets will have on entire operations. The framework is agent-based, allowing bottom up definition and the gathering of emergent behavior, and uses a modified Hughes salvo method for combat, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents messaging structure, and the beliefs, desires, and intentions (BDI) agent model. The modeling of communication and BDI creates myopic agents that are constrained by the information they can obtain, process, and react to. In this paper, the framework is first depicted and then validated by the creation of a model with the purposes of defining the requirements for a future asset, the Transformable Craft. The creation and testing of the model prove that the requirements for the framework have been met with success. The potential applications of the framework ranges from data-farming military operations models for future asset requirement, characterizing military operations systems, and providing a stepping stone for future agent-based military operations modeling and simulation work.