Opinion Dynamics in Command and Control Network with Impact of Informal Organization

Abstract

For social organizations, formal communication transmits goals, policies, and directions, while informal communications are supplement to the formal structure filling organizational gaps and maintaining the linkages. This communication model has been researched and named opinion dynamics for some years. However, the relations between formal and informal structures have not been fully revealed. To tackle this problem, this paper builds a hierarchical command and control (C2) organization network, introduces the basic opinion dynamics model and proposes the coupled network composed of formal and informal network. To study the communication impact of informal network on formal network, various numbers of groups and parameter settings (tolerance and influence) of the two networks are studied compared to standalone formal organizations. Experiment results show that informal organization has communication converging impact on opinion evolutions in military C2 network.