Optimal planning for autonomous air vehicle battle management

We formulate a dynamic air vehicle assignment problem to sequentially determine the optimal allocation of air vehicle and ammunition resources to threat clusters in an air to ground campaign. A threat cluster includes a number of different types of threats, which are assumed to cooperate among themselves when they are engaged by a team of air vehicles. The objective is to efficiently allocate the assets to eliminate as many valuable threats as possible while minimizing the air vehicle attrition. This problem is formulated as an optimal control problem, whose exact solution can be obtained for small size problems by dynamic programming. For larger more realistic problems, we investigate hierarchical control and potential function methods to solve the optimal control problem in a computationally efficient manner.