WISDOM-II: A Network Centric Model for Warfare

With recognition of warfare as a complex adaptive system, a number of AgentBased Distillation Systems (ABDs) for warfare have been developed and adopted to study the dynamics of warfare and gain insight into military operations. These systems have facilitated the analysis and understanding of combat. However, these systems are unable to meet the new needs of defence, arising from current practice of warfare and the emergence of the theory of Network Centric Warfare (NCW). In this chapter, we propose a network centric model which provides a new approach to understand and analyse the dynamics of both platform centric and network centric warfare. Introduction Simulation is an important part of the Operations Researcher's tool box in assisting decision makers. Traditionally, Defence uses human-based warfare simulation to assess risks, optimise missions, and make tactical, operational and strategic decisions on change. However, simulation can be expensive and may not explore enough aspects of the problem or provide statistical validity. Recent research (Ilachinski 1997; Lauren 2000) shows that warfare is characterised by nonlinear behaviours and that combat is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS). This has attracted attention from researchers and military analysts and a number of ABDs have been developed to understand and gain insight into military operations. They help the military analysts explore What if? questions that allow investigation of concepts and development of capability options. However, with recent practice of warfare and the emergence of the theory of NCW (Alberts 1999; Wilson 2004), analysts have found that it is hard to use these systems to understand and verify the new theory and concepts in warfare (Yang 2004). The military analysts often ask questions such as: how can we reach certain goals; why certain strange behaviours have emerged; and why the same setup has produced different results. Because almost all existing ABDs were built on platform centric warfare and existing agent architectures, it is very difficult for them to answer these questions. In this chapter, we propose version II of the Warfare Intelligent System for Dynamic Optimization of Missions (WISDOM)