Game-theoretic modeling and control of military operations with partially emotional civilian players

Civilians are not just passively static but might purposefully take actions to help one side in a battle. Sometimes civilians might directly join one side if they are excessively agitated by the other side. In this paper, a three-player attrition-type discrete time dynamic game model is formulated, in which there are two opposing forces and one civilian player that might be neutral, biased, or even joining one side publicly. Emotions of civilians are dynamically updated via anger mechanism. An example scenario and extensive simulations illustrate possible applications of this model, and comparative discussions further clarify the benefits. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.