Impact of Informal Network on Opinion Dynamics in Command and Control Network

Abstract

This paper aims to study the opinion dynamics in military command and control (C2) network with the impact of informal network. The authors reviewed recent opinion dynamics models and explored the relationships between formal and informal networks in detail. Then the opinion dynamics model in C2 network was introduced and a hybrid network based on small-world or scale-free network was proposed. Afterwards, the authors studied the opinion dynamics based on the formal C2 network and hybrid network by computer simulations, and found that opinion dynamics with the impact of informal network is almost independent on the network properties (including small-world, scale-free and rewiring probability) but dependent on the scale of the informal network. And it is concluded that the larger the size of informal network is, the better it can facilitate convergence of opinions in formal C2 network.