Self-organized air tasking: Examining a non-hierarchical model for joint air operations

The hypothesis of this paper is that it is possible to structure a non-hierarchical approach to air tasking in the conduct of joint air operations. For the private sector, advances in information and communication technologies have led to innovations in organizational structures in order to know more across the enterprise. However, the application of these “value network” principles has not been fully applied to the processes upon which the U.S. organizes for joint force operations. We construct a non-hierarchical model for the tasking of air assets in order to test an agent-based approach to the servicing of targets in an air campaign, using agent-based simulation techniques and models established by Epstein & Axtell (SugarScape) within the Santa Fe Institute's Swarm agent modeling environment.