Title: Game Optimal Support Time of a Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile

Authors: Janne Karelahti, Kai Virtanen, and Tuomas Raivio

Status: Proc. of the 11th International Symposium on Differential Games and Applications, Tucson, Arizona

Keywords: Air combat, missile duel, dynamic games, trajectory optimization, nonlinear programming.

The paper formulates a support time game arising in one-on-one air combat with medium range air-to-air missiles. The game model provides game optimal support times of the missiles that can receive target information from the launching aircraft for selectable support times. The payoffs of the game are formulated as a weighted sum of the probabilities of hit to the adversary and own survival. Under suitable simplifying assumptions, the Nash equilibrium of the game can be computed by an iterative search involving a series of optimal control problems. The constructed model is illustrated by a numerical example.