DETERMINATION OF THE OPTIMAL TRAJECTORY OF THE MOVEMENT OF AIRCRAFT IN AREAS WITH COMPLEX TERRAIN UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE ENEMY

Abstract

One of the main issues in the controlling of aircraft in difficult terrain during wartime is to ensure normal movement, but also to fulfill the requirements of evading enemy control. This paper proposes an improved ant swarm algorithm that makes it possible to pre-determine and optimize the trajectory of aircraft in such areas. When applying this method, a special parameter is included in the probability of choosing a movement trajectory – the height of the terrain above sea level, so that each ant does not enter territory controlled by the enemy. Using a 2D-H digital elevation map, the rectangular area under study is divided into 90 m × 90 m squares. To take into account the variability of the terrain, the heuristic function of the ant swarm algorithm takes into account the parameters of distance, height and smooth surface. Additionally, to reduce the number of iterations and computations, the ants are divided in half by number and released from the start and end points simultaneously. As a result, it allows you to choose the shortest and minimum trajectory among various calculated trajectories. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, a number of computational experiments were conducted. Experimental results on various simulated and real terrain maps show that this algorithm can be used to select an initial reference trajectory in difficult terrain.