Process-based running mechanism for Agent-based warfare simulation

Abstract

In the Agent-based warfare simulation, the behavior of Agents representing the operation entities is very complicated. The event routine-oriented simulation strategy makes the description and execution of Agent's simulation models lack of flexibility and expandability, which isn't helpful to reduce the complication of the modeling and simulation. In this paper, Process Interaction is presented as the simulation strategy for the Agent-based warfare simulation. The different kinds of Agent's behavior in physical, information and cognitive domains are described in different processes, which reduces the coupling among the behavior in the three domains and improves the expansibility of the Agent's behavior models. The scheduling operations of the behavior process including startup, hold, continuing to run and termination are controlled with Process Interaction so that the model developers don't need to manage the scheduling of the Agent's behavior processes, which is implemented with the multi-thread mechanism using the method of thread pool. This approach makes the Agent's behavior description more understandable and clearer and effectively reduces the complication of the Agent's behavior description and simulation scheduling. Through an application case, the proposed method is validated.