The Tyche And Safe Models: Comparing Two Military Force Structure Analysis Simulations

In the past, several force structure analyses have been conducted for the Canadian Armed Forces using moderate fidelity (e.g., Tyche) and low-fidelity (e.g. Stochastic Fleet Estimation or SaFE) simulation models within optimization frameworks. Monte Carlo discrete event simulations like Tyche are computationally expensive and can only be used in optimizations that require few force structure evaluations. The SaFE model acts as a simple surrogate model that can be utilized by more global optimization techniques. SaFE, originally developed to study air mobility fleets, was adapted to accommodate a larger set of capabilities and more scheduling heuristics so that the performance of many force structures can be quickly assessed while minimizing a set of objectives. The amount of time required to find the SaFE optimal force structures is significantly less than using Tyche. This indicates that SaFE could be an important tool for discovering paretooptimal force structures (within the space of all possible mixes) that would represent practical lower bounds on the force structure requirements for accomplishing expected future scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the use of Tyche and SaFE through simulation optimizations on a given dataset.