Route planning for air missions in hostile environments

Air mission planning in hostile environments requires that multiple dependent objectives are taken into account. For example, the aircraft must be unharmed in order to perform reconnaissance in an area of interest. Moreover, the risk that the aircraft gets hit depends on the probability that the enemy’s sensors are tracking the aircraft. This paper suggests and analyses an expected cost model for mission routes. It is shown that only a few parameters need to be adjusted for combining different objectives, such as maximizing the survivability, maximizing the probability of performing mission task(s) and minimizing the time in air. The route planning problem is formulated as the optimization problem of finding the route with minimum expected cost. An implemented route planner utilizing particle swarm optimization is used for demonstrating the method with simulations. It is shown that the route planner is able to take dependencies between objectives into account. The conclusion is that the method is useful for planning air missions in hostile environments with multiple objectives.