Minimum effort pursuit guidance with delayed engagement decision

The paper proposes a guidance algorithm for a single pursuer facing multiple maneuvering evaders, one of which is finally engaged by the pursuer. It is assumed that the pursuer makes a decision to engage one of the evaders at a given moment in flight, and the probability of each possible choice is known in advance. Under these assumptions, a guidance law is derived that optimizes the expected integral quadratic control effort, where the expectation is taken over all possible engagement decisions. The derived guidance law turns out to be a linear combination of optimal pursuit guidance laws toward each of the evaders separately, with time-dependent coefficients. Numerical simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed guidance law with respect to conventional solutions that do not take into account the delayed engagement decision.