About the resolution of discrete pursuit games and its applications to naval warfare

Abstract

These methods for the resolution of discrete pursuit games provide useful tools for naval applications : indeed, they take into account ill-defined data and provide interesting informations about possible strategies. It seems that a possible application for decision aids can be an interactive system displaying several charts to the ship officer, each chart being based on given assumptions about the opponent. As our modelling allows a “real-time” computation of these charts, the ship officer can introduce all kinds of values deduced from ill defined informations and all kinds of opponent intent and, with the help of these charts, he can deduce his own decision and his own strategy.

Finally, we want to emphasize the fact that, on one hand, the discretization of the space is not so much of a problem as far as undersea pursuits are concerned, since ships are rather big, slow, and since specific problems of underwater acoustics yield imprecision in detection and measurements, and on the other hand, our methods, based on this discretization of the space, do not seem to be so appropriate for missiles launching and airfights, that other models of Pursuit Evasion game match well. So naval warfare has to suggest us new game models for which we have to define a pragmatic approach to find suitable solutions.