Abstract: Weapon target assignment is one of the key decision-making problems in beyond-visual-range (BVR) air combat of multiple UAVs. It refers to that in BVR air combat, multiple UAVs determine the optimal weapon target assignment scheme according to the battlefield situation, the UAV’s capabilities, threat of opponents and other factors, so as to occupy an advantage in the process of BVR confrontation. Considering the new challenge of weapon target assignment problem caused by the strong confrontation and uncertainty of BVR air combat, based on the idea of Nash equilibrium game, the weapon target assignment problem of multiple UAVs in BVR air combat is modeled as a bimatrix matrix game model by constructing the strategic action space and utility function of the game, in which the validity of attacking effect of multiple UAVs against multiple targets is calculated based on the evidence theory. Then according to the relationship between the probability and regret value of the strategy in Nash equilibrium and the demand of BVR air combat, the solution of bimatrix game model is transformed into solving mixed integer programming optimization model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is analyzed through three aspects of experiments. Firstly, based on the typical case of weapon target assignment of multiple UAVs in BV air combat, the calculation process of the proposed method is analyzed; secondly, the effectiveness of the proposed solution is analyzed through numerical experiments; finally, simulation experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for multi UAV BVR air combat. The experimental results show that the proposed method can give an effective weapon target assignment scheme for multiple UAVs in BVR air combat in a short time, improve the probability of winning and reduce the ratio of the number of destroyed UAVs to the number of destroyed targets.

Key words: weapon target assignment; beyond-visual-range (BVR) air combat; UAV; bimatrix game; mixed integer programming