A Method to Solve Missile-Aircraft Pursuit-Evasion Differential Games

Abstract: This paper shows; that, in some conditions we can obtain the exact solution for a missile and an aircraft differential games which minimizes and maximizes the essential pay-off of the problem: the miss distance, without employing any linearized approximation. The idea of our method is, by starting from the aircraft one-sided optimal control solution against a PNG missile, which maximizes the miss distance, and then optimize the missile control to minimize the miss distance. The obtained minimax solution shows the resultant miss distance is far smaller than that of the PNG missile. Although it is impossible to obtain the solution in real time, however, if the results are incorporated into the missile guidance system as a knowledge base, the performance will be fairly improved. The extension of the study into more general cases is also explained.