Study On The Dynamical Behavior Of A Real-Time Distributed Simulation System

The typical time-critical distributed simulation system in military applications involves a large number of entities that interact with each other in real time. The dynamical behavior of this kind of system is very complicated. When there is a disturbance caused by, for example, time delay, the reaction of the system may not remain in the local area. Instead, it can propagate to a wide region and affect many entities. This paper uses a model called Self-Organized Criticality to ex plain the dynamical behavior of a real-time dis tributed simulation system. A generic war game program is used to simulate the real-time inter actions among the entities on a battlefield. The dynamical behavior of the war game is recorded after a large number of runs with randomly gen erated initial conditions. The results show that the system demonstrates the characteristics of Self-Organized Criticality. © 2000, Sage Publications. All rights reserved