The development of an agent-based model to investigate possible power law relationships in peacekeeping operations

Modelling peace support operations is a growing area of research in the defencesector. Extensive development has been done in the area of combat models butthey are not always sufficient when modelling operations other than war.The DIAMOND model is a large scale peace support model capable of mod-elling entire countries. Taking an agent-based approach, we have created a modelthat has the potential to be used in conjunction with DIAMOND, providing thedetail the larger model lacks. Improvements need to be made before this is pos-sible but our model provides a strong starting point.Self-organised criticality is an area of complexity theory that is, in part, iden-tified by a fractal frequency-size ‘avalanche’ distributions. Previous research hasshown a link between self-organised criticality and combat modelling. We lookedfor power-law behaviour in a variety of peacekeeping scenarios.Using our agent-based model we devised a set of scenarios, each one morecomplex than the previous one. Taking the conflict between the peacekeepersand local insurgents, we used two different measures of such to represent the‘avalanches’. The results showed no real evidence of power law relationships butmore experimentation and analysis is needed.