On Distributed Strategies in Defense of a High Value Unit (HVU) Against a Swarm Attack

Abstract

Swarm attacks are of great concern to the U.S. Navy as well as to navies around the world and commercial ships transiting through waters with high volume of marine traffic. A large group of hostile ships can hide themselves among various other small ships, like pleasure crafts, fishing boats and transport vessels, and can make a coordinated attack against a High Value Unit (HVU) while it passes by. The HVU can easily be overwhelmed by the numbers and sustain heavy damage or risk being taken over. The objective of this thesis is to develop heuristic algorithms that multiple defenders can use to intercept and stop the advances of multiple attackers. The attackers are in much larger numbers compared to the defenders, and are moving in on a slow moving HVU. Pursuit guidance laws and proportional navigation (PN) guidance laws, commonly used in missile guidance strategies, are modified to be used by the defenders to try intercepting attackers that outnumber them. Another objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of the heuristic algorithms in defending the HVU against the swarm attack. The probability that the HVU survives the swarm attack will be used as a measure of effectiveness of the algorithms. The impact of various parameters, like the number of defenders and the speed of defenders, on the effectiveness of the algorithms are also evaluated.