Heuristic route planning: an application to fighter aircraft

A route-planner system prototype is described that finds an optimal or near-optimal path for survivable low-level penetration through hostile enemy threats. The planner considers terrain and physical obstacles, threats, fuel constraints, time constraints, aircraft performance characteristics, and pilot input. The mission-level route planner generates a route that includes fuel and time requirements, distance, threat exposure, and metrics to indicate the quality of the path. This path is then passed to a tactical-level route planner that uses models of the ownship and threat capability to generate a detailed flyable route. The A* heuristic search algorithm was selected to determine the routes due to its flexibility and efficient use of computing resources. A route-planner development workstation is also described. This workstation is used to prototype heuristic evaluation functions for the A* algorithm