Military applications of agent-based simulations

Abstract

There continues to be increasing interest from a broad range of disciplines in agent-based and artificial life simulations. This includes the Department of Defense - which used simulations heavily in its decision making process. Indeed, military conflicts can have many attributes that are consistent with complex adaptive systems - such as many entities interaction with some degree of autonomy, each of which is continually making decisions to satisfy a variety of sometimes conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present three applications of agent-based simulations used to analyze military problems. The first uses the MANA model to explore the ability of the U.S. Army's network based Future Force to performan with degraded communications. The second studies how unmanned surface vehicles can be used in force protection missions with the Pythagoras model. The last example examines the standard Army squad size with an integrated effort using MANA. Pythagoras, the high-resolution simulation JANUS.