Adaptive CGFs Based on Grammatical Evolution

Abstract

Computer generated forces (CGFs) play blue or red units in military simulations for personnel training and weapon systems evaluation. Traditionally, CGFs are controlled through rule-based scripts, despite the doctrine-driven behavior of CGFs being rigid and predictable. Furthermore, CGFs are often tricked by trainees or fail to adapt to new situations (e.g., changes in battle field or update in weapon systems), and, in most cases, the subject matter experts (SMEs) review and redesign a large amount of CGF scripts for new scenarios or training tasks, which is both challenging and time-consuming. In an effort to overcome these limitations and move toward more true-to-life scenarios, a study using grammatical evolution (GE) to generate adaptive CGFs for air combat simulations has been conducted. Expert knowledge is encoded with modular behavior trees (BTs) for compatibility with the operators in genetic algorithm (GA). GE maps CGFs, represented with BTs to binary strings, and uses GA to evolve CGFs with performance feedback from the simulation. Beyond-visual-range air combat experiments between adaptive CGFs and nonadaptive baseline CGFs have been conducted to observe and study this evolutionary process. The experimental results show that the GE is an efficient framework to generate CGFs in BTs formalism and evolve CGFs via GA.