Combining Path Planning and Target Assignment to Minimize Risk in a SEAD Mission
Maja Winstrand · 2005
Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) missions are dangerous and constitute the main tasks envisioned, together with precision strike, for the next generation of UAVs. Unmanned systems performing a SEAD missions must be able to autonomously plan and re plan their actions. When addressing planning problems, a common approach is to formulate optimization problems, and a natural choice of objective function is the risk. In this paper, two ideas are proposed to enhance the performance of a SEAD mission planning tool. The first is a natural way to propagate risk assessments from path segments to whole paths. In this way an estimate of the actual failure probability is minimized, not just some vague measure of badness. The second idea is a way to incorporate the oensive capabilities of the aircraft, i.e. target assignment, in the path planning. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the combined approach.