Integrated Assignment and Guidance for Distributed Multi-Pursuer-Target Interception

This paper investigates the problem of distributed multiple pursuers against multiple evaders. And an integrated assignment and guidance strategy is proposed to address the issue. The proposed approach is composed of two loops, the inner loop for guidance and the outer loop for assignment. A general method for analytically deriving the control expenditure of the inner optimal guidance for each pursuer-evader pair is first studied as the performance index for the assignment loop. Then, by minimizing total guidance expenditure, a distributed method with the constraint of local target information is proposed based on the auction-based consensus assignment to obtain a globally optimal allocation scheme. Since the assignment and guidance loops share a unified merit index, the proposed algorithm is believed to outperform the methods for designing the two loops separately. Numerical simulations are performed to support the analytical findings.