A Hierarchical Approach To Multi-Player Pursuit-Evasion Differential Games

The increasing use of unmanned assets and robots in modern military operations renews an interest in the study of general pursuit-evasion games involving multiple pursuers and multiple evaders. Due to the difficulty in formulation and rigorous treatment, the literature in this field is very limited. This paper presents a hierarchical approach to this kind of problem. With an additional structure imposed on decision-making of pursuers, this approach provides conservative guidance to pursuers by finding certain engagement between pursuers and evaders, and the saddle-point strategies are utilized by each pursuer in chasing the engaged evaders. A combinatorial optimization problem is formulated and scenarios are created to demonstrate the feasibility of the algorithm. This is a preliminary study on multi-player pursuit-evasion games and future directions are suggested.