Multicriteria Optimization of Air-to-Air Missiles

The design of an air-to-air missile system involves trade-offs between conflicting measures of effectiveness. Significant measures of effectiveness include fuel requirement, interception time, launch boundaries, real time computation requirements and sensor requirements. This paper formulates the design problem as a multicriteria optimization problem. A direct solution to the multicriteria optimization problem is computationally intractable. A two-step approach is considered to reduce the amount of computation. Next, the methodology is applied to optimize the propulsion control of medium range air-to-air missiles with two pulse rocket motors. Simplifications are made to the method of approach to realize a control law which can be used to determine the interpulse intervals of a multiple pulse rocket motor powered-medium range air-to-air missile. Some preliminary results are shown in the paper.