Entity-Level Simulation of Urban Operations

High-resolution simulation of operations in an urban setting is of great interest to commanders, planners, and analysts at all levels. However, the computational resources needed to represent the urban environment adequately can be high. As well, the behavior of noncombatant entities in the urban environment can be challenging to portray, given its frequently chaotic, uncoordinated nature. Urban operations generally take place against a backdrop of large numbers of unsynchronized entities, each engaged in various "milling" behaviors, as well as some smaller number of entities engaged in commanded behaviors. The flow of entities through the urban terrain over the course of time is by itself of interest in the context of traffic modeling, and in the identification of potential chokepoints. In addition to their default behaviors, a realistic simulation of urban environments must include reasonable responses of crowd entities to events that are likely to be of global interest as well.