Situation and Threat Assessment in BVR Combat

Modern fighter aircraft are equipped with Beyond Visual Range (BVR) missiles that can be fired at the enemy from very long distances. Since BVR combat occurs outside the\ud range of the pilot's vision, they must rely on information from the on-board and off-board sensors and sources to determine the location of an opposing aircraft. Pilots make decisions based on the air surveillance picture portraying tracks of airborne targets that is obtained by mentally fusing the information coming from several sources. The workload on the pilots increases as the number of targets in combat arena grows or the situation becomes complex. Therefore to reduce the workload on the pilots, it is required to automate some of the decision making activity. In this paper, a decision support system named Intelligent\ud System for Situation Assessment in Air-Combat (ISSAAC) is developed based on Fuzzy logic and Bayesian Network hybrid technique to assist the pilots participating in BVR\ud combat. The main focus is on the development of the mental model of pilot. The developed system is an integration of platform models, sensor models, pilot mental models and data\ud processing algorithms. The capability of the system is demonstrated by simulating an air-to-air combat scenario consisting of six targets