Heterogeneous surface-to-air missile defense battery location: a game theoretic approach

Nicholas T. Boardman (), Brian J. Lunday () and Matthew J. Robbins ()

Journal of Heuristics, 2017, vol. 23, issue 6, No 1, 417-447

Abstract: Abstract In the context of an air defense missile-and-interceptor engagement, a challenge for the defender is that surface-to-air missile batteries often must be located to protect high-value targets dispersed over a vast area, subject to which an attacker may observe the disposition of batteries and subsequently develop and implement an attack plan. To model this scenario, we formulate a two-player, extensive form, three-stage, perfect information, zero-sum game that accounts for, respectively, a defender’s location of batteries, an attacker’s launch of missiles against targets, and a defender’s assignment of interceptor missiles from batteries to incoming attacker missiles. The resulting trilevel math programming formulation cannot be solved via direct optimization, and it is not suitable to solve via full enumeration for realistically-sized instances. We instead adapt the game tree search technique Double Oracle, within which we embed either of two alternative heuristics to solve an important subproblem for the attacker. We test and compare these solution methods to solve a designed set of 52 instances having parametric variations, from which we derive insights regarding the nature of the underlying problem. Enhancing the solution methods with alternative initialization strategies, our superlative methodology attains the optimal solution for over 75% of the instances tested and solutions within 3% of optimal, on average, for the remaining 25% of the instances, and it is promising for realistically-sized instances, scaling well with regard to computational effort.

Keywords: Air defense; Military operations research; Double oracle; Subgame perfect nash equilibrium; Simulated annealing; Tabu search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10732-017-9350-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joheur:v:23:y:2017:i:6:d:10.1007_s10732-017-9350-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10732

DOI: 10.1007/s10732-017-9350-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Heuristics is currently edited by Manuel Laguna

More articles in Journal of Heuristics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().