A System-of-Systems Approach for Assessing the Resilience of Reconfigurable Command and Control Networks

Increasing complexity and connectivity of military systems has created a need to investigate novel Command and Control (C2) approaches. In addition to being effective, C2 approaches must also be resilient to handle operating conditions characterized by uncertainty and mission volatility. This paper proposes an SoS approach to assessing C2 resilience, focusing on C2 architectures defined by information sharing and decision authority networks. Network reconfiguration based on random rewiring is used to improve the resilience of C2 architectures. C2 capability is measured by information entropy-based battlespace awareness and used as the primary metric for evaluating the resilience of C2 architectures. Awareness results are supplemented by complex network metrics to provide additional insights into the behavior of C2 architectures. An agent-based simulation of a network-centric unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance mission is used to simulate C2 architecture performance. Results show that random rewiring improves the resilience of C2 architectures to random and targeted node removal. Network largest component size is shown to accurately predict the awareness of a C2 architecture, indicating that C2 resilience can be achieved by maintaining network connectivity. Algebraic connectivity and inverse average path length also show similar trends to awareness. These results suggest the use of connectivity and path length network metrics to design reconfiguration strategies for C2 resilience.