Guidance strategies against defended aerial targets

The three-body engagement scenario is considered where an aerial missile, homing onto a target aircraft, encounters a defender missile launched by the aircraft. A given set of defender-missile guidance laws, namely, proportional navigation and line-of-sight guidance, are considered, and analysis is carried out for proportional navigation and pure pursuit attacking missile strategies. Analytic launch envelopes and lateral accelerations ratios for the four resulting scenarios are derived. Closed-form expressions for attacking missile initial position and launch angles are derived for a successful evasion from the defender. Numerical simulations are carried out which comply with the analytical findings. The resulting launch envelopes are highly sensitive to the adversary's guidance strategy, and thus, concerning practical implementation, a game theoretic analysis is carried out. Game solutions are obtained in pure and mixed strategies, resulting in the missile's evasion probability envelope, that is, based on the four individual launch envelopes.