A novel approach to asynchronous, decentralized decision-making in military command and control

This paper proposes a novel asynchronous, decentralized decision-making algorithm for military command and control. Unlike centralized command and control, in the proposed approach, all entities-infantry, tanks, and aircrafts, of the system are granted significant autonomy, subject to strict guidelines and directives, and provided with the necessary computing power, intelligence gathering facilities, communications gear, and decision-making aids. The overall decision task is distributed among these entities. As a result, every entity's execution is asynchronous, concurrent and autonomous, leading to efficient and fast decision making. The ability to model is made possible by the fact that the transfer of discrete data, geographically-dispersed decision-making entities, asynchronously generated stimuli, and the presence of feedback in the data transfer process are the properties of asynchronous, distributed discrete-event simulation algorithm. This paper also presents an implementation of the proposed approach on a testbed of 40+SUN sparc workstations, configured as a loosely-coupled parallel processor and performance results for different scenarios.<
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