Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

The proposal's original goal included an investigation of a novel, asynchronous, decentralized approach to military command, control, and communications. Our accomplishments have been substantial and are stated subsequently. The communications and military C3 community and we, the researchers, gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of the BMDO/IST (formerly SDIO/IST) office and the US Army Research Office. We have successfully modeled and simulated complex, broadband-ISDN networks on a network of workstations, configured as a loosely-coupled parallel processor. We have also succeeded in pioneering the concept and design of a dynamic and distributed self-healing algorithm to achieve robustness and high fault tolerance in network management. Our pioneering study of fuzzy thresholding has led to a profound result in network buffer design. Fuzzy queue management adapts superbly to sharp changes in cell arrival rates and maximum burstiness of bursty traffic sources, yielding lower cell discard rates, high throughput of cells through the network, and lower cell-blocking rates. In the world of military command and control that dates back thousands of years, centralized C3 has been the dominant rule. Except for General Patton in World War II and a few reports in Operations Just Cause and Desert Storm, most military leaders practiced synchronized C3. Our research is possibly the first to formally characterize and study the concept of decentralized command and control through accurate battlefield simulation on parallel processors, for realistic battlefield scenarios. Performance results indicate that the decentralized C3 algorithm achieves faster reaction times to new and dynamic information.

The objective of this to address analytical and computational issues that arise in the modeling, analysis and design of distributed tactical decisionmaking. The research plan has been organized into two highly interrelated research areas: Distributed Tactical Decision Processes; and Distributed Organization Design. The focus of the first area is the development of methodologies, models, theories and algorithms directed toward the derivation of superior tactical decision, coordination, and communication strategies of distributed agents in fixed organizational structures. The framework for this research is normative. The focus of the second areas is the development of a quantitative methodology for the evaluation and comparison of alternative organizational structures or architectures. The organizations considered consist of human decisionmakers with bounded rationality who are supported by C3 systems. The organizations functions in a hostile environment where the tempo of operations is fast; consequently, the organization msut be able to respond to events in a timely manner. The framework for this research is descriptive. Keywords; Petri nets; Organization theory.