Implementing Efficient Dynamic Threat Avoidance Routing Based on Dijkstra’s Shortest Path Algorithm in the Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling (AFSIM)

Simulating pre-planned routes and dynamic threat avoidance routing represents a significant problem for operations analysts. Without methods to create operationally valid routes through automation, the analyst is generally faced with hard coding individual routes for multiple aircraft over the entirety of the mission set. This research developed, implemented, and analyzed threat avoidance routing based on Dijkstra’s algorithm for aircraft attempting to operate in an anti-access area denial (A2AD) environment capable of dynamically updating the mission route as new threat information is learned. A designed experiment was conducted to determine the impact of grid parameters on operational effectiveness metrics and computational costs. Statistical analysis results show that the proposed algorithm produced the best operational performance with grid spacing set to 50% of the smallest surface to air missile (SAM) threat radius without incurring prohibitive computational costs.