Battle Space Model Based on Lattice Gas Automata for Underwater Warfare Simulation

Abstract

To simulate complex undersea engagement, many platforms, such as submarines and battleships, participate in underwater warfare simulation. To perform an underwater simulation with reasonable communication among the platforms and environmental factors, a middleware that can treat communication and environmental factors is needed. This paper presents the battle space model, which is capable of propagating various types of emissions from platforms in underwater warfare simulation, predicting interesting encounters between pairs of platforms, and managing environmental information. The battle space model has four components: the logger, spatial encounter predictor (SEP), propagator, and geographic information system (GIS) models. The logger model stores brief data on all the platforms in the simulation, and the GIS model stores and updates environmental factors such as temperature and current speed. The SEP model infers an encounter among the platforms in the simulation, and progresses the simulation to the time when this encounter will happen. The propagator model receives various emissions from platforms and propagates these to other “within-range” platforms by considering the propagation losses and delays. The battle space model is based on the discrete event system specification (DEVS) and the discrete time system specification (DTSS) formalisms. Especially, the propagator and GIS models are based on lattice gas automata for considering an underwater acoustic field and environmental space. To verify the battle space model, simple underwater warfare between a battleship and a submarine was simulated. The simulation results with the model were the same as the simulation results without the model.