A POMDP approach for scheduling the usage of airborne electronic countermeasures in air operations

This paper considers the usage of airborne electronic countermeasures (ECM) to protect the aircraft from being detected and targeted by hostile multifunction radar, and an approach for scheduling the usage of ECM based on partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is presented. This POMDP-based approach combines the outputs of electronic support measure (ESM) with the control strategies of ECM, and lets the hostile radar stay in the search state most often. The components of the POMDP tailored to scheduling the usage of ECM are specified, and the solution to POMDP, i.e., the policy is obtained to describe the optimal behavior of the ECM. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated with simulation techniques, and the simulation results indicate that this approach performs better than the existing ones, which are treated as special policies in the paper.