Visual aircraft identification as a pursuit-evasion game

A new computational decomposition scheme is applied to a pursuit-evasion game that describes the visual identification of a foreign intruder aircraft in three dimensions. The intruder is assumed to minimize its distance to the state border at the time of identification, whereas the identifying aircraft wishes to intercept the intruder as far away inland as possible. The identification occurs when the identifier reaches the intruder's velocity and attitude within a given distance from it. The computational scheme decomposes the minimaximization of the payoff into two sequences of optimal control problems that can be solved using discretization and nonlinear programming techniques.