A credibility evaluation method for complex simulation systems based on interactive network analysis

The credibility evaluation method for a single simulation model is relatively mature at present. While there is still a great need to provide an effective credibility evaluation method for complex simulation systems, which is the basic premise to assist the design, test, evaluation and optimization of a complex research object based on constructing its simulation system. In this paper a credibility evaluation method for complex simulation systems based on the interaction analysis of their internal data is proposed. A directed weighted interaction network describing the interaction among models in a complex simulation system can be constructed. Further, based on the credibility of each simulation model and the network structure, we can quantitatively analyze their impacts on the overall credibility of the system. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, we constructed a validation system based on the network structure of a multi-agent cooperative simulation system with known credibility. The evaluation result comparison showed that our method can provide a feasible way for the relatively accurate credibility analysis of complex simulation systems. Finally, our verified method was applied to evaluate the credibility of the complex hardware-in-the-loop simulation system composed with over 100 components, which provided a quantitative way instead of traditional qualitative evaluation by experts.