A comparison of techniques for optimisation of C3I processes realised on resource-limited networks

We represent military operations by a process graph comprising a sequence of tasks (processes) that need to be executed in order to achieve a military objective or mission. The resources that are to execute those tasks may be represented by a resource graph, i.e. a network of resources. Given these representations, the command and control design becomes an optimal scheduling problem that aims to achieve the assigned mission in the shortest possible time without violating the specified constraints. The paper compares several heuristic process-to-resource mapping techniques. As the problem of finding an optimal solution is NP-hard, all the proposed techniques are asymptotically optimal. Since the structure of networked resources determines the performance of military operations given a mapping algorithm, the paper also defines a measure that can be used to determine the value of a network structure