A Game-Theoretic Model for One-on-One Air Combat

Abstract

The primary goal of air combat maneuvering is to neutralize the enemy under any circumstances. A critical step in achieving this goal is to gain and maintain aerial advantage by choosing and executing appropriate flighter maneuvers. In this paper, one-on-one air combat is modeled as a two-player zero-sum game to obtain optimal strategies for the players to select the flighter maneuvers. A new approach for constructing the game payoff function that accounts for the loss/gain of aerial advantage during the execution of a maneuver is proposed. A case study to evaluate the proposed approach, by comparing it with an existing approach, is performed through computer simulations.