Defense and homeland security applications of multi-agent simulations

Abstract

Department of Defense and Homeland Security analysts are increasingly using multi-agent simulation (MAS) to examine national security issues. This paper summarizes three MAS national security studies conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School. The first example explores equipment and employment options for protecting critical infrastructure. The second case considers non-lethal weapons within the spectrum of force-protection options in a martitime environment. The final application investigates emergency (police, fire, and medical) responses to an urban terrorist attack. There are many potentially influential factors and many sources of uncertainty associated with each of these simulated scenarios. Thus, efficient experimental designs and computing clusters are used to enable us to explore many thousands of computational experiments, while simultaneously varying many factors. The results illustrate how MAS experiments can provide valuable insights into defense and homeland security operations.

Designs for Large‐Scale Simulation Experiments, with Applications to Defense and Homeland Security

“…For example, three national security studies are summarized in Lucas, Sanchez, Martinez, Sickinger, and Roginski (2007). The first example explores equipment and employment options for protecting critical infrastructure, the second case considers nonlethal weapons within the spectrum of force-protection options in a maritime environment, and the final application investigates emergency (police, fire, and medical) responses to an urban terrorist attack.…”

Violent extremist network representation and attack the network course of action analysis in social simulation

“…In order to leverage social simulations for attack the network course of action analysis, the use of exploratory designs of experiments is required [25,26]. In particular, the use of large exploratory designs of experiments are called for in order to explore the range of potential futures generated not only by potential courses of actions selected by decision makers, but by the noise created by the unpredictable nature of the VEN and its activity and the unknown variance within the human population being modeled.…”

A user-layered approach for modelling and simulating terrorist attacks

“…Each agent individually assesses its situation and makes decisions on the basis of a set of rules (Bonabeau, 2002). Agent based models have been used to simulate and analyse interaction-based attack scenarios (Mysore et al, 2006) (Carley et al, 2006) (Bulleit, 2005), by allowing agents to interact with each other and their perceived virtual environment (Lucas et al, 2007). Applications of ABM to counter terrorism include simulating the effect of an attack on a city, focusing on both chemical (Mysore et al, 2006) and biological (Carley et al, 2006) attacks.…”

“…Applications of ABM to counter terrorism include simulating the effect of an attack on a city, focusing on both chemical (Mysore et al, 2006) and biological (Carley et al, 2006) attacks. Multi-agent simulations can be used within the security sector as an insight into the execution of high-resolution simulations, such as war-gaming (Lucas et al, 2007). One of the benefits offered by ABM is that it allows "analysts to quickly build, run and analyse many thousands of simulation experiments over a broad range of input variables" (Lucas et al, 2007).…”

“…Multi-agent simulations can be used within the security sector as an insight into the execution of high-resolution simulations, such as war-gaming (Lucas et al, 2007). One of the benefits offered by ABM is that it allows "analysts to quickly build, run and analyse many thousands of simulation experiments over a broad range of input variables" (Lucas et al, 2007). One disadvantage of ABM is that the effects of the interactions between agents are uncertain, meaning that it is difficult to make predictions about the system's interactions.…”