A Direct Simulation Method for Calculating Multiple-hit Vulnerability of Aircraft with Overlapping Components

Abstract When components overlap, the aircraft multiple-hit vulnerability analysis usually consists of two steps. The first is to determine the aircraft unique existent states using vulnerable area decomposition method, and the second is to calculate the aircraft cumulated probability of kill using Markov chain method for exact solution or Monte Carlo method for solving the combinatorial explosion problem. This article proposes a direct simulation method for calculating the aircraft multiple-hit vulnerability in order to avoid the complex vulnerable area decomposition issue. In this method, random method is adopted to produce the multiple-hit locations and Bernoulli trial is used to determine the kill or no kill of each component hit by one shot line, and kill tree is checked to determine aircraft existent states during one simulation. When the number of times of simulation is large enough, the aircraft multiple-hit vulnerability can be statistically obtained. Analysis shows that the proposed direct simulation method can provide good accuracy compared with Markov chain method and avoid the combinatorial explosion problem, and does not need the complex vulnerable area decomposition and can directly calculate the aircraft multiple-hit vulnerability. Another important finding is the binomial or Poisson simplified approach is sometimes very poor in accuracy, and should be used cautiously.