Multi-level tolerance opinion dynamics in military command and control networks

• A multi-level tolerance opinion dynamics model is proposed and applied in military C2 network.
• Links added based on tree structure, small-world show better consensus performance than scale-free network.
• For opinion dynamics with tree network, additional links make them to converge.

Opinion exchange is useful when a military agent needs to take the opinions of others into account before decision making. Few studies have addressed opinion dynamics in military command and control (C2) organizations, which are often hierarchically ranked in a tree structure. Moreover, military agents should have different tolerance levels when communicating with differentially ranked agents, which is our reasoning for proposing an opinion dynamics model with multi-level tolerance in this study. We can use this model to test opinion dynamics models in depth and further analyze and compare them to traditional tree organizations and other organization forms, including small-world and scale-free networks. Opinion dynamics experiments show that although traditional indices such as a clustering coefficient or the average distance of a small-world network are worse than those of a scale-free network, opinion dynamics indices, which include the number of rounds to fixed opinions, number of opinion clusters, and relative size of the largest small-world cluster are unexpectedly better than those of a scale-free network. Moreover, adding links to a tree network can enhance the tendency to consensus, while a small-world network needs fewer links compared to a scale-free network.