A group of innovators at Purdue has developed a new way of analyzing past battles to help predict how future ones may play out.
Their battlefield simulation treats troop movements as a fluid concept rather than as individual moving pieces on a map. This allows them to simulate complex battles with less computation.
Sorin Matei is a professor of communication and an associate dean in Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts and one of the developers of the simulation.
He insists it’s not just another first-person shooter or combat strategy game.
“We are trying to reconceptualize the idea of simulation by moving away from agent-based modeling, to a concept borrowed from physics, from fluid mechanics, that considers a body of people, of soldiers, as a fluid,” Matei said. “So, we think of military operations as flows.”
This allows the Purdue team to run simulations taking out the human element, then compare the simulation to the real-world results of a battle and see how the human element contributed. That makes the simulation valuable for military academies and war colleges to use in their teachings.
The group has been collaborating with the Naval Postgraduate School, West Point, and others and hopes to have the simulation ready for distribution by the end of the spring semester.
The group is part of an initiative at Purdue called FORCES – which stands for strategy, security and social systems. They used the simulation to create a virtual reality tour of the D-Day landings and are working on simulating Pickett’s Charge during the Civil War battle at Gettysburg and Operation Barbarossa, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in World War Two.
“We're trying to see if we can predict, broadly, where those, what the flashpoints of a future conflict might be and what the possible responses might be,” Matei said. “So, it’s not just for the past but also about understanding the future.”
They’re also working on models for the South China Sea, which is among the potential hot spots today.
Matei comes at the project from the perspective of a social scientist rather than a war historian.
“My area of interest is space and time modeling, human behavior, space and time,” Matei said. “I did some work where people are running away from hurricanes and tornadoes. And I also studied mental maps of fear and crime. And it struck me that military history and military operations research is ripe for a fresh look by adding data science to all historical data and facts.”
