Personnel Flow Management Toolbox: A Complex Adaptive Systems Approach

Every year, billions of dollars are lost to bad decisions. Without the proper tools to analyze and evaluate decisions before implementation, even more money will be lost. Decision problems that must contend with autonomous entities are the areas most subject to erroneous decisions due to the complexity and cost-prohibitive nature of extended simulation and testing of hypothetical decisions. Advances in the area of Complex Adaptive Systems show that simple abstractions of complex phenomena can produce generalized results applicable to broad classes of problems, thus creating opportunities to analyze complex multi-agent problems without full-fidelity simulation. In order to address the need for a multi-agent discrete event simulation tool, with specific applications to the management of shipboard manpower and personnel, Orbital Research, Inc. proposes the development of a graph-theoretic multi-agent simulation tool that will incorporate analysis tools based on Complex Adaptive Systems theory. This Phase I work will: 1. Develop a generic multi-agent simulation tool based on graph-theoretic abstractions of real-world environments. 2. Investigate the applicability of Complex Adaptive Systems theory to the analysis of multi-agent systems. 3. Perform a proof-of-concept simulation of a real-world multi-agent scenario and correlate the data, showing that the abstracted simulation produces the same overall trends.