MAS Combat Simulation

Multi-agent systems offer a new stage in the evolution of combat simulation. Originally, warfighters simulated combat manually to explore alternatives and plan their campaigns. The first applications of computers to combat simulation used algorithms that aggregated the warriors on each side, such as differential equations or game theory, effectively modeling the entire battlespace with a single process. Entity-based models such as OOS and Combat XXI assign a single agent to each entity, following the standard MAS agenda. A new modeling construct, the polyagent, takes this trend one step further, and uses several agents to model each construct. This approach addresses several challenges that face the traditional MAS approach, including fitting, closure, dynamism, and singularity. This chapter surveys the history of combat modeling, gives two examples of polyagent systems (one for planning, the other for adversarial prediction), and discusses how this construct addresses the challenges.