Study on the Dynamical Behavior of a Real-Time Distributed Simulation System

Abstract

The typical time-critical distributed simulation system in military applications involves a large number of entities that interact with each other in real time. The dynamical behavior of this kind of system is very complicated. When there is a disturbance caused by, for example, time delay, the reaction of the system may not remain in the local area. Instead, it can propagate to a wide region and affect many entities. This paper uses a model called Self-Organized Criticality to ex plain the dynamical behavior of a real-time dis tributed simulation system. A generic war game program is used to simulate the real-time inter actions among the entities on a battlefield. The dynamical behavior of the war game is recorded after a large number of runs with randomly gen erated initial conditions. The results show that the system demonstrates the characteristics of Self-Organized Criticality.

Keywords

Distributed simulation system self-organized criticality SOC war games battlefield simulation

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