Multicriteria Game Approach to Air-to-Air Combat Tactical Decisions for Multiple UAVs

Air-to-air combat tactical decisions for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (ACTDMU) are a key decision-making step in beyond visual range combat. Complex influencing factors, strong antagonism and real-time requirements need to be considered in the ACTDMU problem. In this paper, we propose a multicriteria game approach to ACTDMU. This approach consists of a multicriteria game model and a Pareto Nash equilibrium algorithm. In this model, we form the strategy profiles for the integration of air-to-air combat tactics and weapon target assignment strategies by considering the correlation between them, and we design the vector payoff functions based on predominance factors. We propose a algorithm of Pareto Nash equilibrium based on preference relations using threshold constraints (PNE-PRTC), and we prove that the solutions obtained by this algorithm are refinements of Pareto Nash equilibrium solutions. The numerical experiments indicate that PNE-PRTC algorithm is considerably faster than the baseline algorithms and the performance is better. Especially on large-scale instances, the Pareto Nash equilibrium solutions can be calculated by PNE-PRTC algorithm at the second level. The simulation experiments show that the multicriteria game approach is more effective than one-side decision approaches such as multiple-attribute decision-making and randomly chosen decisions.