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