A new approach to multi-aircraft air combat assignments

In this paper, a multi-layer perceptron based on 6 important features is proposed for predicting the time needed by our aircraft to approach enemy aircraft when they are in a combat situation. Then the prediction module is incorporated into a SOMO-based decision aid for solving multi-aircraft assignment problems. The problem of assigning our aircraft to meet head-on enemy aircraft in a combat situation is formulated as a constrained resource allocation problem. The objective function of the multi-aircraft assignment problem is a measure for computing the expected overall predominance value of aircraft over enemy aircraft based on four predominance factors. The SOMO algorithm which is an extension version of the SOM algorithm for optimization is executed to find an assignment such that the expected overall predominance value of aircraft can be maximized. Four hundred combat situations are simulated to test the effectiveness of the proposed SOMO-based decision aid. The simulation results demonstrate that the SOMO-based decision aid could provide appealing solutions within 0.5 s even for combat situations with a large number of aircraft.