Cooperative Missile Guidance Strategies for Maritime Area Air Defence

Mid-course guidance phase classically refers to the procedure guiding the missile to a terminal handover point in order to acquire the target motion through its on-board sensor. The mid-course guidance law differs significantly from the guidance logic for the terminal homing phase due to the inherited characteristic of the midcourse guidance: it must not only find the best condition for the terminal homing phase, but also deliver the missile to that condition using only the target motion data updated by the external source such as a plane, ship, or ground base. In this paper we revisit the micourse guidance problem for maritime area air defense by mixing two contributions (one for mid course guidance law design and one for target allocation). The proposed solution is based on differential games (capturability considerations) for allocation of the missiles. The main idea is that a cooperative mid-course guidance strategy can defend the area as long as it assures that the depending area is always inside the defended area defined by earliest intercept geometry.