Award Date

5-1-2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Committee Member

Wolfgang bein

Number of Pages

91

Abstract

In strategic operations, the assessment of any given situation is very important and may trigger the development of a mission plan. The mission plan consists of various actions that should be executed in order to successfully mitigate the situation. For a new mission plan to be designed or implemented, the effect of the previous mission plan should be accessed. These mission plans use various sensors to collect the data which can be very large and aggregate them to obtain detailed information of the situation. In order to implement an effective mission plan the current situation has to be assessed effectively. We propose to model the situation as a graph in which the nodes denote the participants and edges denotes relationships between participants.

Situational assessment for a given situation consists of identifying the current participants and the relationships between current participants. We model these participants as vertices of a graph and the relationships between the participants as weighted arcs. As events happen the situation changes, so does the graph. Changes in the graph can be dramatical or negligible. We derive the similarity between the two graphs at different moments of time. By doing so we will be able to see the effect of the event that caused the change in the graph structure.

We are comparing the similarities of the graphs using the concept of minimum spanning tree. The minimum spanning tree of a graph is a rough estimate of the details of the nodes and the edges of the graph. We therefore propose a new way of assessing a situation and a new way of analyzing the differences between the same set of participants at various intervals of time.

Keywords

Graph theory; Military planning; Spanning trees (Graph theory); War – Mathematical models

Disciplines

Applied Mathematics | Computer Sciences | Mathematics | Military and Veterans Studies

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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