Mathematical Modeling and Optimal Control of Battlefield Information Flow
Abstract
The U.S. Army's Future Force requires information dominance to succeed, yet finds itself with an ever-increasing gap between its capacity to collect information and its information processing capacity with little understanding of how to efficiently utilize scarce processing resources. In this investigation, a model is proposed to adequately represent the flow of information within a command and control context toward the end of optimally controlling this flow. The model is conjectured to be NP-hard in general. Closed-form optimal solutions are derived for special cases of the model, while other cases are shown to be NP-hard. A case of the model is shown to equate to a special case of the quadratic assignment problem not previously known to have a closed-form solution, and such a solution is derived. Upper and lower bounds are derived for more general cases of the model, and heuristic strategies are proposed and tested in discrete event simulation. Strong empirical evidence is produced to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of one heuristic.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA483492
Entities
People
- Donovan D. Phillips
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School