An Improved Resilience Evaluation Method for Hierarchical Networked Command and Control System

Command and control networks play a vital and often decisive role in military operations. Operating in dynamic and uncertain environment, they are exposed to enemy disturbances which may lead to performance degradation, making it crucial to enhance their resilience. Resilience modeling and evaluation are essential to reflect the ability of networked command and control system to maintain reliable and safe operation after actively resisting disturbances, adjusting and recovering. Previous resilience studies mainly focus on command and control network based on functional heterogeneity and its functional chain calculation methods. However, the command and control nodes with different hierarchies involved in reality have rarely been considered. To address this issue, this study proposes an improved resilience evaluation method for hierarchical command and control systems. Firstly, a hierarchical network model for the command and control system is developed, in which a new functional chain search algorithm considering hierarchical heterogeneity is proposed to reflect mission capability. Then, a hierarchy-adapted resilience evaluation method is proposed, including the hierarchy-aware performance metric and its corresponding resilience process model. The proposed method considers both absolute time scales and performance variation process balancing stability, in which different strategy schemes can be compared by distinguishing the resilience of different systems. A case study is given to demonstrate and verify the proposed methods. The proposed method is more realistic and conducive to guiding the operation and maintenance management of networked command and control system.

Keywords: Hierarchical command and control system, networked modeling, hierarchy-adapted resilience evaluation, resilience metric, resilience process.