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the amount of engagement, reconnaissance and on scene coordination
means capable to process JFS tasks as well as the applicable chain of
command and the political rules of engagement. JFS services may be
performed by international forces (a so-called joint/combined setting)
introducing additional decision making processes and aspects.
In order to compare different coordination patterns in joint fire
support (JFS) scenarios, an agent-based model was developed [40, 41,
42]. This model was developed for analyzing the question at hand
and for evaluating the GRAMS reference model.
By following the GRAMS reference model to develop the JFS model,
the model developers could focus purely on domain-specific issues. In
this sense, the GRAMS reference model served well as a guideline
throughout the model development process.
The strict seperation of events and actions defined by the GRAMS
reference model turned out to be helpful also. This separation allowed
the definition of complex event-action chains where each event could
trigger different actions at the same time, whereas these actions could
produce events as well. While being beneficial, these event-action
chains caused trouble at the same time. In fact, it turned out that
they could hardly be analyzed and debugged. This is not necessarily
a drawback of the GRAMS reference model, but has at least two
reasons: First, the tool chain currently available does not support
all aspects of the GRAMS reference model very well and debugging
features are far from complete. Second, and perhaps more notably,
this complexity of modeling coordination patterns may be immanent
to these kind of models.