SIMULATION-BASED AIRCRAFT ROUTE PLANNING

Abstract

Real war situation causes much of the destruction of human life and property so there is a need of application that can simulate this type of situation. Simulation methods are used to plan within environments involving large-scale uncertainty, multiple interacting elements and complex dynamics which simulates the actions of agents and intentions of coordinates before committing to a plan. Simulation Based Aircraft Route Planning application involves multiple interacting intelligent objects, called agents and their complex dynamics. The project have been developed in Graphical User Interface (GUI) based scenario editor, with capabilities to add elements, such as Ammunitions Factory of the enemy (Target), Enemy Fighter Aircraft, Ground based Radar units, Surface to Air Missiles (SAM) systems. Also, it provides user to edit attributes of the elements, which are required in simulation process. Further the GUI have capabilities to specify other parameters such as weights attached to cost of route in terms of distance and probability of detection for each route, which plays a role in the simulation activity. Appropriate data structures have been designed to represent the state information as well as the constituent elements of the system. The route planner module of the application plans to create different possible routes. The role of the simulation-based planner in each case is to determine, keeping in view all the available information, the 'best route' or the near optimal path(s) from a starting point to destroy a specified target or objective and return back to base, given a number of certain and uncertain threats to the mission in a defined scenario. The task of finding the near optimal paths can be achieved by several different techniques, one of which is by use of simulation methods. Results of the activities performed by the simulation module and the optimal route have been displayed using the application's GUI. The work has been developed using Visual C++ with MFC (Microsoft - Foundation Classes) and Win32 API on Windows 98 platform.