Enhancing Situation Awareness in Beyond Visual Range Air Combat with Reinforcement Learning-based Decision Support

Military aircraft pilots need to adjust to a constantly changing battlefield. A system that aids in understanding challenging combat circumstances and suggests appropriate responses can considerably improve the effectiveness of pilots. In this paper, we provide a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based system that acts as an aid in determining if an afterburner should be turned on to escape an incoming air-to-air missile. An afterburner is a component of a jet engine that increases thrust at the expense of exceptionally high fuel consumption. Thus it provides a short-term advantage, at the cost of a long-term disadvantage, in terms of reduced mission time. Helping to choose when to use the afterburner may significantly lengthen the fiight duration, allowing aircraft to support friendly aircraft for longer and suffer fewer friendly fatalities due to this extended ability to provide support. We propose an RL-based risk estimation approach to help determine whether additional thrust is required to escape an incoming missile and study the benefits of thrust-aided evasive maneuvers. The suggested technique gives pilots a risk estimate for the scenario and a recommended course of action. We create an environment in which a pilot must decide whether or not to activate additional thrust to achieve the intended aim at a potentially high fuel consumption cost. Additionally, we investigate various tradeoffs of the generated evasive maneuver policies.