Little by Little Does the Trick: Design and Construction of a Discrete Event Agent-Based Simulation Framework

Simulation is one of the most widely used techniques in operations research. In the military context, agent-based simulations have been extensively used by defense agencies worldwide. Despite the numerous disadvantages and limitations associated with time-stepping, most of the combat-oriented agent-based simulation models are time-step implementations. The Discrete Event Scheduling (DES) paradigm, on the other hand, is free of these disadvantages and limitations. The scope of this thesis is to design and implement a library of reusable software components that will facilitate building combat-oriented agent-based simulation models by extending the Simkit DES toolkit. We describe our design of what an agentbased DES implementation framework should look like. We show that the extensive use of Java interfaces allows the user to implement different models and scenarios without being constrained by pre-built components. We also enhance Simkit’s existing Sensing model by introducing a Situational Awareness model and a Behavioral model. Finally, we build a small agent-based model using the component architecture to demonstrate the library's functionality.