Exploiting UML to model military organisation and military behaviour

Unified Modelling Language is a set of graphical description techniques for specifying, visualising, implementing and documenting object-oriented systems. The behaviour of military strategy and planning in a typical military organization is dynamic. A military organization has large number of entities(both distinct as well as similar) and the prevalent relationships between them. There are also complex association between various objects. Also, the flow of critical and confidential information between a wide variety of objects makes modelling of a military organization more difficult. In this paper we present a study of modelling military organisation and military behaviour in a generic manner, using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) as a knowledge representation technique. The class diagram that is provided by UML is well suited for representing military organisations whose structure is well-known, since military units and their interrelations can be represented as classes and interrelations between the classes. On the other hand, it is a much harder task to represent military organisations that are not well-known or military behaviour because of the uncertainty associated with them. Different behaviours are triggered in different environments using different doctrines, and the outcomes of the behaviours are uncertain. Due to complexity, time constraints and war friction, causal relations between different factors, which play an important role in warfare, may be uncertain.