A Survey on Simulation Technologies for Unmanned Swarm Operational Experiments

The Unmanned Swarm Operations Experiment (USOE) simulation technology serves as a critical supporting technology for validating unmanned swarm combat concepts and assessing operational capabilities. It is essential to conduct a systematic investigation into the current research status of USOE simulation technology to deliver high-quality research outcomes to combat commanders and relevant researchers. This study aims to analyze the state-of-the-art USOE simulation technology through a systematic review of 71 papers published between 2004 and 2025. The findings reveal that USOE simulation technology primarily adopts a distributed architecture for its design, with recent research efforts focusing on implementation methods such as task allocation, path planning, and ad-hoc networking communication. Furthermore, real-time performance and autonomy occupy the most prominent positions in USOE simulation technology research. However, the current USOE simulation technology fails to adequately meet the needs of combat commanders and related researchers, especially in terms of limitations for autonomous parallel operations experiments of unmanned swarms. Based on our findings, we suggest intensifying efforts and research in the following aspects: Prioritizing research on real-time visual simulation technology, optimizing the network communication overhead of simulation systems, enhancing research on system confrontation modeling and simulation technology, advancing research on simulation technology based on intelligent gaming, and enhancing the autonomous decision-making capability and computational efficiency of simulation systems. Finally, this study identifies the key research directions for future USOE simulation technology.