Automatic evaluation of air mission routes with respect to combat survival

Aircraft flying in hostile environments are exposed to ground-based air defense systems. It is not always possible to both accomplish the mission and fly outside the range of the enemy’s weapon systems, especially if the positions of the enemy’s systems are not perfectly known. Automatic evaluation of mission routes from a combat survival perspective could therefore aid the pilots to plan their missions. When updated information regarding the positions and capabilities of the enemy’s systems is received during flight, the route could be re-evaluated and the mission could be re-planed or aborted if it is assessed to be too dangerous.The survivability model presented here describes the relation between the aircraft and the enemy’s defense systems. It calculates the probabilities that the aircraft is in certain modes along the route, e.g., undetected, tracked or hit. Contrary to previous work, the model is able to capture that the enemy’s systems can communicate and that the enemy must track the aircraft before firing a weapon. The survivability model is used to calculate an expected cost for the mission route. The expected cost has the attractive properties of summarizing the route into a single value and is able to take the pilot’s risk attitude for the mission into account. The evaluation of the route is influenced by uncertainty regarding the locations of the enemy’s sensors and weapons. Monte Carlo simulations are used to capture this uncertainty by calculating the mean and standard deviation for the expected cost. These two parameters give the pilots an assessment of the danger associated with the route as well as the reliability of this assessment. The paper concludes that evaluating routes with the survivability model and the expected cost could aid the pilots to plan and execute their missions.