Defensive Counterair for Air Base Air Defense using Directed Energy and Kinetic Energy Weapons

Air bases in key locations provide a strategic advantage to the countries that access them, and are at constant threat from adversaries. This research seeks to determine the optimal maneuvering of a fixed number of fighter aircraft in a combat air patrol for defensive counterair to maximally and effectively attrit the inbound cruise missile threat to a stationary high value asset such as an air base. The problem formulation identifies multiple objectives for the model: minimize the distance traveled for the fighters, minimize the time utilized to engage the incoming cruise missiles, and maximize the number of cruise missiles destroyed. The model is a mobile routing problem with a mobile demand, where the demand is the set of incoming cruise missiles that the fighter seeks to engage. The ℇ-constraint method is used as the multi-objective optimization technique to determine the full set of Pareto efficient solutions. An a priori hierarchical multi-objective method called lexicographic optimization is used to determine if there is a ranking of objectives that solved more efficiently. Lexicographic optimization is used to solve the model for each objective sequentially