Simulation and Wargaming

14Using an Ontology to Design a Wargame/Simulation System

Dean S. Hartley, III

Hartley Consulting, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA

Motivation and Overview

Both wargames and simulations require a model (in the most general sense of the word) of the domain of interest. For a wargame/simulation system, the model must be consistent throughout the system. This commonality is difficult to achieve when the model resides only in the minds of the creators. An ontology provides a significant starting point for a well‐defined model by identifying and defining all of the potentially needed components of the model and their relationships. For some domains, the ontology may also identify the processes that connect causes to results; however, for domains involving human conflict, many of these processes are ill‐defined. These ill‐defined processes must be supplied by human wargamers or by calls to theoretical or probabilistic algorithms in the simulation. Thus, in human conflict domains, the ontology supplies a framework for the model definition and identifies the places where decisions are needed on wargaming or simulation algorithms.

In this chapter, I will describe the Modern Conflict Ontology and show how it provides the components that apply to a (generally) theater‐level conflict. Then I will show how the ontology specifies the places where calls to either the human decisions or algorithmic decisions are needed. I will conclude with observations on modeling human conflict at different levels ...