Agent-Oriented Control of Battlefield Simulations

This paper reports on a project at the Land Operations Division, DSTO, to augment the battlefield simulator, CAEN, with Intelligent Computer-Generated Forces (ICGF). The motivation for this work was to simplify scenario creation/execution by providing for the high-level modelling of aggregated entities, such as platoons and companies, together with the reasoning processes which drive the associated command and control structure. This work has demonstrated that representing aggregated entities using agent-based technology enables modelling of the required behaviour at a fairly abstract level. At runtime, these abstract specifications map to quite complex behaviours which "emerge" during the running of the simulation.