Study on the Optimal Strategy of Missile Interception

Missiles have been playing an important role in modern wars. In order to gain advantage in missile contests, the technology of missile interception have been developed for many years. However, constrained by current technology, it is still very difficult to intercept successfully. Thus, it may need to optimize the allocation of intercept missiles to prevent attack missiles from hitting targets. This paper proposes a method to optimize the missile interception strategy (intercept missile allocation) by simulating the games of missile interception, which jointly considering multiple phases, multiple targets, cost and the risk attitude of the defender. This method is developed based on combinatorial theory and cumulative prospect theory. There are two optimization goals considered: the cost and the prospect value. We studied two cases where the detection of attack missiles is perfect or imperfect respectively. Four illustrative examples are presented to illustrate the proposed method and several directions of research in future are pointed.