Graph and Agent Approach to Force Effectiveness and Resilience (GAAFER)

Stellar Science proposes the development of a systems modeling language (SysML) representation of space-domain enabled kill webs called the Graph and Agent Approach to Force Effectiveness and Resilience (GAAFER). This SysML representation is used to assess force design through system-of-systems simulation complemented by graph-based representations of the kill web. We will leverage agent-based modeling and simulation to evaluate the performance of space-enabled kill webs against alternative kill-web architectures.  Specifically, we will investigate diverse force architectures that include those leveraging space-based assets for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and communications, as well as those that only use more traditional ground and air-based versions of these systems. We will develop a custom profile in SysML tailored for force design to represent these architectures, which will impose additional constraints on the model during the development process. We will also extend an existing tool to transform the SysML model directly into a form that can be simulated within AFSIM. These force architecture representations will be used in several ways. First, they will be evaluated using a custom designed graph theoretic engine that will assess the connectivity, resiliency, and general performance of the architecture. Second, the SysML representation will be used to populate an AFSIM-based simulation in order to evaluate the simulated performance of the architecture and estimate its robustness on real-world tasks. The graph-theoretic engine is intended to not only directly analyze the SysML representation, but also to evaluate and provide key metrics to the AFSIM simulation in an iterative assessment process to optimize the force design. Attendant to these tools, we will build a dashboard for visualization that will support analysis of the performance of any given force architecture.