Minimum Effort Pursuit Guidance with Multiple Delayed Engagement Decisions

This paper presents a guidance algorithm for a pursuer in a many-on-many intercept scenario that includes the possibility of dynamic weapon–target (re)assignment based on a simple target priority scheme. Given the probabilities of success of each preceding pursuer against each possible evading target, a guidance algorithm is designed that provides minimum average quadratic effort over all the possible outcomes of the engagements that may take place during the time of flight. The result is a guidance algorithm in the form of a linear combination of (augmented) proportional navigation guidance terms with time-varying weights. Effectively, this is a one-against-many guidance law. An efficient algorithm for the implementation of the guidance law is presented, and numerical simulations based on the nonlinear equations of motion are used to demonstrate its performance.