A Novel and Practical Method of Situation Assessment for Multi-Agent Combat

In this paper, a method of situation assessment for multi-agent combat was proposed. The key idea of this method is to define the situation as the reciprocal of time, which was inspired by a line from Luc Besson's 2014 science fiction movie "Lucy": "Time is the only true unit of measure." For one single agent, the individual threat situation is the sum of the movement and attack situation. The former is calculated as the reciprocal of time traveling to the target position and the latter is the reciprocal of time to kill one opposing agent. These situations are affected by the agent's properties, such as its life and abilities of perception, communication, movement and attack, which were considered and modelled in this paper. Through communication, all agents' data can be exchanged within the camp so that the group threat situation can be obtained by adding up all individual threat situations. Meanwhile, the group threat situation of opposing camp is treated in the same way, except the properties of opposing agent are unknown and should be estimated. Then the difference between the group threat situations of the two camps is regarded as the combat situation. Finally, to evaluate the combat situation of diverse layouts of camps, each grid value of the combat situation in a small area around the opposing agents are added up and the sum is called the combat evaluation index. The simulation shows that by defining the situation as the reciprocal of time, unified dimension is achieved. So that different kinds of situations can be calculated and unified effectively, not only of one single agent but also of opposing camps.