All Rights Reserved iv
DedicationTo my friends and family.Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.
Now all has been heard;here is the conclusion of the matter:Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. v Acknowledgments I am grateful for my advisor's continual direction in completing this work as well as the friendship developed over the past year. I also appreciate my committee, Dr. Yang and Dr. Savakis, for their review and insights into this thesis. I acknowledge my colleagues in the lab, Ryan and Eyup, for helping me and providing the opportunities to enjoy engineering together. Finally, I owe many thanks to my brothers, sisters, parents, friends, and family for remaining patient with my schedule and for eagerly encouraging me to persevere. vi Abstract Testability of a Swarm Robot Using a System of Systems Approach and Discrete Event Simulation Matthew R. Hosking Supervising Professor: Dr. Ferat Sahin A simulation framework using discrete event system specification (DEVS) and data encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML) is presented to support agent-inthe-loop (AIL) simulations for large, complex, and distributed systems. A System of Systems (SoS) approach organizes the complex systems hierarchically. AIL simulations provide a necessary step in maintaining model continuity methods to achieve a greater degree of accuracy in systems analysis. The proposed SoS approach enables the simulation and analysis of these independent and cooperative systems by concentrating on the data transferred among systems to achieve interoperability instead of requiring the software modeling of global state spaces. The information exchanged is wrapped in XML to facilitate system integration and interoperability. A Groundscout is deployed as a real agent working cooperatively with virtual agents to form a robotic swarm in an example threat detection scenario. This scenario demonstrates the AIL framework's ability to successfully test a swarm robot for individual performance and swarm behavior. Results of the testing process show an increase of robot team size increases the rate of successfully investigating a threat while critical violations of the algorithm remained low despite packet loss.