Threat Plane Method for Developing Operational Rules of an Autonomous Anti-Air Defense System on a Warship against Multiple Attacking Missiles

摘要

This paper proposes Threat Plane Method (TPM) as a new framework for developing operational rules of an autonomous anti-air defense system on a warship in which prioritization among multiple anti-ship missiles, selection of a proper anti-air weapon, and calculation of when to use each weapon are incorporated. For the methodology proposed, a new theoretical concept called threat plane is introduced. On the threat plane, urgency and survivability of threats, anti-ship missiles in this problem, are evaluated and threat level of anti-ship missiles are assessed according to a threat level function (TLF). Operational rules are derived as an optimization problem called Threat Level Reduction Problem (TLR), where a strategy that best reduces the threat level is to be found. Since how the TLF and TLR are defined makes an optimal strategy different, the goal of TPM is deriving an appropriate TLF and TLR so that an obtained solution is indeed an effective strategy. It is to be shown that TPM can provide better mathematical formulation of missile defense problems in that it can give optimal solutions with multiple decision criteria considered as well as a TLF and TLR can be modified or extended to an advanced form easily. This paper first introduces TPM as a general framework to develop an operational rule for an arbitrary system that deals with multiple threats, and then TPM is applied to the warship defense problem. After a TLF and TLR for this application is derived, how the TLF and TLR can provide an appropriate strategy is shown with analysis on the optimal strategies for some example problems.