An analysis of stochastic duels involving fixed rates of fire

Abstract

The thesis presents an analysis of stochastic duels involving two opposing weapon systems with constant rates of fire. The duel was developed as a stationary Markov chain with stochastic matrices of transition probabilities constructed from the single shot kill probabilities of the weapon systems. A comparison was made of the presented Markov chain analyses results with results from other accepted conditional probability methods. As expected, this comparison established the validity of the Markov chain analysis and indicated advantages of the Markov chain approach in analysis of discrete process stochastic duels. The analysis was then extended to the two versus one duel where the three weapon systems were assumed to have fixed rates of fire.