George Mason University

The DoD and especially the U.S. Army has spent considerable resources over the past decade in to find budget friendly and powerful models and simulations of ISR assets and the sensors they use.  Within the Electro-Optic and Infrared spectrum, every military sensor has been modeled and is useable in several government simulations that focus on replicating the performances of aerial and terrestrial platforms.  With these solutions, warfighters have greater flexibility to create more realistic wargames and testing environments since they can easily replicate every platform and sensor in their organization and in any environment that the government has mapped (or has created).

LIEUTENANT COLONEL CHAD BATES is currently a PhD candidate at George Mason University within the College of Science.  He is finishing up on his dissertation to earn his degree in Earth System and Geoinformation Sciences focusing on unmanned aerial systems and remote sensing. LTC Bates is a Modeling and Simulation officer (Functional Area 57) within the U.S. Army and has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Prior to beginning school, LTC Bates was stationed with the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) at the Pentagon where he worked M&S issues for the military intelligence community and also on aerial platforms and their sensor payloads.  He earned a bachelor’s degree in Human Factors Engineering from the United States Military Academy, and double master degrees from Webster University in Information Systems Management and Human Resources Management.  While at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. he earned another master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies.

Modeling environments with thousands and millions of entities (such as people or vehicles) is currently very challenging. Traditional simulations of military operations can simulate up to hundreds of entities, but this may not be enough for particularly dense areas, such as cities. Agent-based modeling gives the possibility to model many agents at a low resolution. Combining Agent-based modeling with more traditional high resolution models promises a multi-resolution capability to allow analysis of a highly detailed small number of entities in a context of a much larger population.

DR. MICHAEL HIEB is a Research Associate Professor at George Mason University’s Center for Excellence in Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I Center) and a Technical Director for the Army’s Simulation to C4I Overarching IPT (SIMCI OIPT). From 1997 to present Dr. Hieb has worked to formalize the information required for Command and Control (C2) of both Military Organizations as well as Civil and Non Governmental Organizations. This has involved both NATO and IEEE working groups and has spanned the fields of Computer Science, Networking, Semantics, and Computational Linguistics. Dr. Hieb has over 100 Publications and has presented his research on Command Intent to many International C2 Forums. Dr. Hieb also was the Principal Investigator for several major projects at the C4I Center, including Research for the Army Geospatial Center called on integrating C2, M&S and Geospatial functionality. He received his PhD in Information Technology from George Mason University in 1996, a MS in Artificial Intelligence & Human Factors from George Washington University and a BS in Nuclear Engineering from UC Santa Barbara.