Firepower concentration in cellular automaton combat models – an alternative to Lanchester

One of a new generation of combat models is examined to determine how its behaviour differs from older approaches based on first-order linear differential equations. This new methodology, which uses ‘cellular automaton’ or ‘agent-based’ models, has been around for a decade, prompting closer scrutiny. The method gives entities within a combat simulation the autonomy to react to circumstances in their local area. The reaction is determined by each entity's ‘personality’. It is found that the automata tend to either fight as a massed force, or form dispersed patterns of clusters within clusters. Such a pattern is known as a ‘fractal’. By adopting this pattern, a non-intuitive relationship between the kill probability of the automata and the force attrition rate develops. This provides a compelling example of how the result presented by earlier workers – that automaton models may evolve into fractal distributions – can have significance for operational researchers.