Comparative Analysis of PSO Techniques for Artillery Deployment in Constructive Simulation

Military uses simulation of warfare to train their officers/commanders in planning and execution of the operations. Modeling for decision-making to get the operational/tactical realism is a challenging for simulation designers/developers. There are numerous aspects in warfare where commanders use their field experience while carrying out the operational/tactical planning. Multiple parameters, relevant for the given situation are taken into consideration while employing/deploying the units. These parameters and their importance keep varying with the changing war situation. In the wargame simulation, there are need to optimally employ/deploy the entities which on ground is done by sub-unit commanders. Realistic automation of force elements below the resolution of the targeted trainee (commander) is the key for successful simulation having detailed high resolution combat process and attrition models underneath. One such aspect is deployment of artillery in the mountain terrain. Multiple factors need to be taken into consideration while deploying them. In our current work, we mathematically formulated the required functions to quantify the required factors and optimized them on the given objective. We applied PSO, APSO and PP-PSO for the optimization. The results were compared for a specific scenario. Number of iterations in PP-PSO resulted in MOE improvement by 6% with higher number of iterations. The automated deployment generated by PSO techniques was examined by the military experts. The results are satisfactory and the approach has numerous potentials in automated planning in contemporary military simulation and decision support systems.