Fighter Design and Fleet Effectiveness Evaluation via System of Systems Battlespace Simulation

Kurzfassung

With ever-increasing regional conflicts and demand for military deterrence and peace, there is a need for highly capable, agile and multirole manned and unmanned fighter. Due to difficulty in prediction, uncertain needs drive more and more capabilities in a specific vehicle leading to bigger, more expensive and harder to upgrade multirole fighter aircraft. Today’s fighter aircraft operate in a highly agile environment, fulfilling a wide set of roles like air superiority, aerial reconnaissance, forward air control, electronic warfare, etc. To fulfill these tasks, several kinds of weapons, sensors and communication systems are necessary. That results in a larger airframe and also in a higher total weight. Next generation fighters will not incorporate all of the systems for the specific roles. Instead the systems responsible for the abilities are spread over several smaller unmanned platforms which are linked to the manned fighter by network connections. The fighter itself can be lighter and more agile, and the abilities can be upgraded by additional platforms. The increased complexity of the battlespace increases the scope for evaluating requirements, conceptual design of new fighter aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicle, mid-air refueling tanker, etc. Using a System of Systems (SoS) Battlespace simulation driven aircraft design approach helps to simulate multi-platform interaction and account for numerous uncertainties in the development of future battle systems. For this reason, this research focuses on developing a SoS framework for fighter evaluation and design with three different aspects: - Linking conceptual fighter aircraft design & weapon performance to a large multi vehicle battle scenario via agent-based simulation - Analyzing the sensitives of technology, vehicle design, fleet composition, interoperability and weapon selection as well as evaluating requirements - Obtaining a set of aircraft level parameters for the fighter aircraft that produce improved SoS-level Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) during a Counter-Air Fighter Sweep mission such as blue win rate, Survivability and weapon usage Herein, a baseline aircraft and its sensitivity trade-offs modelled. The mission performance is evaluated by formulating different measures of effectiveness. In summary, this study demonstrates the need for system of systems simulations to derive adversary and operations-tailored vehicles and fleets.