Modeling human and organizational behavior using a relation-centric multi-agent system design paradigm

Today's modeling and simulation communities are being challenged to create rich, detailed models incorporating human decision-making and organizational behavior. Recent advances in distributed artificial intelligence and complex systems theory have demonstrated that such ill-defined problems can be effectively modeled with agent-based simulation techniques using multiple, autonomoous, adaptive entities. RELATE, a relation-centric design paradigm for multi-agent systems (MAS), is presented to assist developers incorporate MAS solutions into their simulations. RELATe focuses the designer on six key concepts of MAS simulations: relationships, environment, laws, agents, things, and effectors. A library of Java classes is presented which enables the user to rapidly prototype an agent-based simulation. This library utilizes the Java programming language to support cross-platform and web based designs. All Java classes and interfaces are fully documented using HTML Javadoc format. Two reference cases are provided that allow for easy code reuse and modification. Finally, an existing metworked DIS-Java-VRML simulation was modified to demonstrate the ability to utilize the RELATE library to add agents to existing applications. LCDR Kim Roddy focused on the development and refinement of the RELATE design paradigm, while LT Mike Dickson focused on the actual Java implementation. Joint work was conducted on all research and reference caseshttp://www.archive.org/details/modelinghumanorg00roddU.S. Navy (U.S.N.) author

A theory of strategy

vi, 91 leaves ; 28 cm.The notion of 'strategy' plays a central role in game theory, business, and war. This thesis offers an understanding of the term can be rendered canonical for all three contexts. I argue first that rational behaviour is either complacent or non-complacent. Second, what makes non-complacent rationally distinct is reconnaissance and predictive deliberation. And so third, what we can count as 'strategic' behaviour is the employment of reconnaissance and deliberation in pursuit of alternative practices of higher utility

Behavioral War Powers

A decade of war has meant a decade of writing on war powers. From the authority to start a war, to restrictions on fighting wars, to the authority to end a war, constitutional lawyers and scholars have explored the classic issues (war initiation, prosecution, and termination) through the classic prisms (text, history, and function) for a new generation of national security challenges. Despite the volume of writing on war powers and the urgency of the debates in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, war powers debates are widely seen as stagnant. We introduce a new set of perspectives into the war powers literature. Over the last four decades, behavioral psychologists have identified persistent biases in individual and group decisionmaking. The behavioral revolution has had a significant impact on legal scholarship — primarily in law and economics — and has also influenced scholars in international relations, who increasingly write about psychological biases and other decisionmaking challenges. These insights, however, have yet to be applied in the war powers context. This Article brings the behavioral literature into the conversation on war powers, showing how lessons from behavioral psychology are relevant to decisions on war and peace. It outlines a variety of psychological biases that bear on decisions about war and peace, applies these lessons to a variety of war powers debates, and discusses broader institutional design strategies for debiasing decisionmaking. The lessons of psychology provide new functional perspectives on classic war powers debates: the authority of Congress versus the President to initiate wars, the scope of presidential authority to use force, the ability of Congress to restrict the conduct of war, the War Powers Resolution and the termination of wars, and the role of the United Nations. Some of the decisionmaking biases point in conflicting directions, so there are no simple answers or tidy solutions. But understanding where important decisions risk going wrong is the first step in figuring out how to make them go right

Employment of indications and warning methods to forecast potentially hostile revolutions in military affairs

The basic premise of a Revolution in Military Affairs is that changes in technology doctrine, and organization have the ability to render existing methods of warfare obsolete. Two distinct visions of a future RMA are beginning to emerge within the defense community. The first involves the integration of precision guided munitions, and superior command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) capabilities. The second vision is of information warfare. In this arena, the control and management of bits and bytes becomes more important than bullets. Because of the potential advantages gained from the realization of an RMA, it is imperative that the United States detects, and accurately evaluates, any efforts by a potential adversary to achieve a RMA - whatever form it may take. Indications and Warning (I & W) intelligence is a process used by the intelligence community to detect indicators of potential threats while sufficient time exists to counter those same threats. This thesis examines 'how' and 'why' technology, doctrine, and organizations change in order to develop indicators that can be used to detect an emerging RMA.http://archive.org/details/employmentofindi1094535173NANAU.S. Navy (U.S.N.) autho

The Principle of Discrimination in 21st Century Warfare

In this article, Professor Schmitt addresses changes in military technology and the implications of these changes for the humanitarian law of war, with particular focus on the principle of discrimination. Evolution in the machinery of warfare can be expected to improve the precision with which objects may be targeted. At the same time, this evolution may complicate considerations of what constitutes a legally permissible target. As technologically advanced militaries become increasingly interdependent with the infrastructure of civilian life, the line between legal military objectives and protected civilian objects may become blurred. The international legal questions posed by this change will be particularly thorny in the case of warfare between technologically advanced military powers and less developed nations. In the short term, technologically disadvantaged States might have incentives to support a broad definition of legally permissible targets. Alternately, they might support a subjective standard, in which the technological capacity of a belligerent State partially determines its legal obligations. Professor Schmitt argues, however, that such an expansion of permissible military objectives would not only disserve the goals of humanitarian law, but ultimately prove disadvantageous to all States

The pre-war life and military career of Douglas Haig.

SIGLELD:D49712/84 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Street Smarts: unconventional warriors in contemporary joint urban operations

Marine forces are expeditionary in nature yet require the full range of Public Key infrastructure (PKI) services at deployed sites with limited bandwidth and access to their respective Registration Authority (RA). The development of a PKI solution for the tactical arena is a fluid and complex challenge that needs to be answered in order to ensure the best support of tactically deployed forces. Deployed Marine forces will need the capability to issue and re-issue certificates, perform certificate revocation, and perform key recovery within the command element of the deployed unit. Since the current United States Marine Corps (USMO) PKI was not designed with the tactical environment in mind, the full extent of PKI deficiencies for field operation is unknown. This thesis begins by describing public key cryptography, the implementation and objectives of a USMC PKI, and the components necessary to operate a PKI. Next, tactical issues that have been identified as areas of concern along with their proposed solutions are presented. Supporting material describes design issues, such as scalability and interoperability, and technical challenges, such as certificate revocation lists (CRL), key escrow and management of tokens.http://archive.org/details/streetsmartsunco109451091

Techniques for the allocation of resources under uncertainty

L’allocation de ressources est un problème omniprésent qui survient dès que des ressources limitées doivent être distribuées parmi de multiples agents autonomes (e.g., personnes, compagnies, robots, etc). Les approches standard pour déterminer l’allocation optimale souffrent généralement d’une très grande complexité de calcul. Le but de cette thèse est de proposer des algorithmes rapides et efficaces pour allouer des ressources consommables et non consommables à des agents autonomes dont les préférences sur ces ressources sont induites par un processus stochastique. Afin d’y parvenir, nous avons développé de nouveaux modèles pour des problèmes de planifications, basés sur le cadre des Processus Décisionnels de Markov (MDPs), où l’espace d’actions possibles est explicitement paramétrisés par les ressources disponibles. Muni de ce cadre, nous avons développé des algorithmes basés sur la programmation dynamique et la recherche heuristique en temps-réel afin de générer des allocations de ressources pour des agents qui agissent dans un environnement stochastique. En particulier, nous avons utilisé la propriété acyclique des créations de tâches pour décomposer le problème d’allocation de ressources. Nous avons aussi proposé une stratégie de décomposition approximative, où les agents considèrent des interactions positives et négatives ainsi que les actions simultanées entre les agents gérants les ressources. Cependant, la majeure contribution de cette thèse est l’adoption de la recherche heuristique en temps-réel pour l’allocation de ressources. À cet effet, nous avons développé une approche basée sur la Q-décomposition munie de bornes strictes afin de diminuer drastiquement le temps de planification pour formuler une politique optimale. Ces bornes strictes nous ont permis d’élaguer l’espace d’actions pour les agents. Nous montrons analytiquement et empiriquement que les approches proposées mènent à des diminutions de la complexité de calcul par rapport à des approches de planification standard. Finalement, nous avons testé la recherche heuristique en temps-réel dans le simulateur SADM, un simulateur d’allocation de ressource pour une frégate.Resource allocation is an ubiquitous problem that arises whenever limited resources have to be distributed among multiple autonomous entities (e.g., people, companies, robots, etc). The standard approaches to determine the optimal resource allocation are computationally prohibitive. The goal of this thesis is to propose computationally efficient algorithms for allocating consumable and non-consumable resources among autonomous agents whose preferences for these resources are induced by a stochastic process. Towards this end, we have developed new models of planning problems, based on the framework of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the action sets are explicitly parameterized by the available resources. Given these models, we have designed algorithms based on dynamic programming and real-time heuristic search to formulating thus allocations of resources for agents evolving in stochastic environments. In particular, we have used the acyclic property of task creation to decompose the problem of resource allocation. We have also proposed an approximative decomposition strategy, where the agents consider positive and negative interactions as well as simultaneous actions among the agents managing the resources. However, the main contribution of this thesis is the adoption of stochastic real-time heuristic search for a resource allocation. To this end, we have developed an approach based on distributed Q-values with tight bounds to diminish drastically the planning time to formulate the optimal policy. These tight bounds enable to prune the action space for the agents. We show analytically and empirically that our proposed approaches lead to drastic (in many cases, exponential) improvements in computational efficiency over standard planning methods. Finally, we have tested real-time heuristic search in the SADM simulator, a simulator for the resource allocation of a platform

Chaos Theory: The Essential for Military Applications

I take great pleasure in presenting a remarkable addition to our Newport Papers series. While Major Glenn E. James, the author, received support and assistance from sources within his own service, the U.S. Air Force, the final research and the paper itself are the products of his term in the Advanced Research Program at the Naval War College. This paper typifies the quality of work and capabilities of our students from all the services here at the College. It is an excellent example of the benefits we derive from the close collaboration between our academic and research departments.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1009/thumbnail.jp